Bovie Movie

The true story of one woman’s effort to keep her family afloat under difficult circumstances comes to the screen in this bittersweet comedy drama. Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore) was a woman of intelligence, talent, and pluck living in the small town of Defiance, OH, in the 1950s. Evelyn was married to Kelly Ryan (Woody Harrelson), a man who gave her ten children but not much else; Kelly had a severe drinking problem, struggled to hold on to a job, and tended to spend his money as soon as he earned it. It was seemingly up to Evelyn to support the family, but with ten kids to look after, taking a job outside the home hardly seemed practical. But the resourceful Evelyn discovered a way to bring some extra money into the household — at a time when a number of companies held contests to find new advertising jingles for their products, Evelyn had a genius for coming up with slogans and winning contests, and for the better part of a decade Evelyn kept food on the table and a roof over her head by dreaming up jingles, tag lines, and ad headlines and winning contests with her handiwork, often selling the merchandise she won to pay the bills. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was based on the best-selling memoir by Terry Ryan, who was the sixth of Evelyn Ryan’s ten kids.

Having created an empire on girly shows and skin flicks, Jim Mitchell and Artie Mitchell achieved mainstream success with Behind the Green Door (1972), one of only a handful of hardcore porn movies to do so. Brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen star in the film about the life and troubled times of porn’s dynamic duo. Opening with the 1991 fratricidal murder of Artie (Sheen) at the hands of Jim (Estevez, who also directs), the film flashes back to their father lecturing them on the importance of family. In 1967, while studying film at San Francisco State, Jim’s professor (Peter Bogdanovich) upbraids him for including numerous leering shots of half-naked women in his student works. Soon Jim along with his brother, fresh out of the Army, starts a smut studio in an old warehouse. Their business takes off, and in no time they are being harassed by the police for obscenity. Along the way, the two hire former Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers, get married, and snort half of the cocaine in Bolivia. After the fleeting success of Green Door, their lives spiral into a drug-addled hell. Jim eventually bottoms out, but Artie, wracked by a profound inferiority complex, slides into cocaine dementia and begins to threaten Jim’s family. Things eventually boil over, culminating in that bloody night in 1991. This film was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.