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Director Michael Lehmann was shocked when he looked at the New York Times and Los Angeles Times entertainment sections and saw there were no ads for the second week of dark high school comedy “Heathers.”

When the film opened on March 31, 1989, the indie film studio New World had taken out ads for the comedy that featured Winona Ryder and Christian Slater in career-defining performances.

“It had played at Sundance and had gotten a lot of attention,” he noted. “We were really looking forward to see what would happen when it hit theaters. The first weekend was great — a good screen average for a little indie movie like that. We were super happy.”

But without more ads they knew their little film would be in trouble.

“In those days, the way you decided on a movie in L.A. or New York was to look I the L.A. Times or...

Wild Honey Orchestra: Buffalo  Springfield tribute Alex Theatre, Glendale CA February 17, 2018

The Wild Honey Foundation started putting on themed benefit concerts a quarter century ago and was revived a few years back, now benefitting the Autism Think Tank. A collection of superb Los Angeles-based musicians with extensive résumés comes together, led by guitarist Rob Laufer (Johnny Cash, George Martin, Cheap Trick, etc.) as The Wild Honey Orchestra to back special guest stars (many, but not all, also L.A.-based) and augment existing bands, this year performing songs of Buffalo Springfield, the band that shot Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and Richie Furay (Poco, Souther-Hillman-Furay Band) -- along with bassist Bruce Palmer (later Jim Messina) and drummer Dewey Martin -- to fame in the late '60s.

Thanks to my Wild Honey pal Michael Ackerman, I got to attend both the show and two rehearsals, which even after decades of listening...

Seb Patrick Aug 23, 2016

We look back fondly at the innate weirdness of Nickelodeon's 90s show The Adventures Of Pete And Pete...

At some point in the early 1990s – I forget the exact year, but research tells me it must have been somewhere around late 1993 or early 1994 – something unbearably exciting happened in our suburb of Merseyside. The rumours went around the school playground in hushed whispers: “Have the cable vans been to your street yet?” Yes, cable TV was on its way to Crosby, meaning that for the first time, a world of viewing beyond the ordinary four terrestrial channels was available to homes without a whacking great ugly satellite dish glued to the outside.

Aside from the three major Sky titans – the football, the movies and The Simpsons – by far the biggest reason we all wanted to get cable was access to not one, not two, but three channels dedicated...

It's not that hard to believe that it's been 25 years since the release of "Heathers," on March 31, 1989.

Really, the movie seems like an artifact from a different era, one paradoxically bolder than our own. It's hard to imagine a movie getting made today that makes fun of teen suicide, schoolhouse violence, and the public grieving process that follows both. "Heathers"'s gleefully gruesome satire made stars out of Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, and Shannen Doherty, launched the careers of screenwriter Daniel Waters and director Michael Lehmann, and created the mold for subversive schoolgirl comedies to come, from "Clueless" to "Mean Girls."

"Heathers" wasn't a hit at first, but it eventually became such a huge cult success that it made lunchroom polls and lines like "What's your damage?" into pop-culture fixtures. Still, as many times as you've seen it, there's still much you may not know about "Heathers," from which other...

Photo of Tamberelli and Maronna courtesy Nadia Chaudhury. Used with permission. Check out more of her photos from this event on Uproxx's Warming Glow.

"The last time we met, you were all virgins!"

Syd Straw was right. When the indie rock pioneer guest starred on "The Adventures of Pete & Pete" in 1994, her target audience of Nickelodeon viewers was primarily composed of kids born during the Reagan administration. But last Friday, many those very same kids trudged through the rain the Lower East Side in Manhattan to witness a reunion of the cast and creators of the seminal show at the Bowery Ballroom, celebrating perhaps the smartest, most subversive show ever to pass itself off as a sitcom for preteens.

In January, the cast reunited for a show in Los Angeles to much acclaim. So much, in fact, that the show's organizer, The A.V. Club, decided to put on the...

If you were a kid who grew up during the '90s, chances are you were probably watching either MTV or Nickelodeon to get your fix of entertainment for the day. And if you watched Nickelodeon, you were probably a fan of “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” the oddball series featuring two brothers both named Pete and their sometimes surreal adventures growing up in the suburb of Wellsville. Created by Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi -- who were working in the promo department at the still-fledgling network -- 'Pete & Pete' had begun as a series of shorts in 1989 before becoming a regular series several years later. But this wasn’t just any kids program. Not only did it feature an 8-year-old with a tattoo of a topless mermaid named Petunia and a personal superhero wildly gesticulating in skin tight pants but featured recurring guest stars, including Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop,...

There’s something wonderfully ambitious about the Radio Free Song Club, a new podcast created by singer/songwriter Kate Jacobs and Wfmu DJ Nicholas Hill. They’ve challenged a handful of veteran songwriters to record a new song every month to debut on the show. The “club” now includes Dave Schramm (The Schramms, Yo La Tengo), Peter Blegvad (Golden Palominos), Jody Harris, Victoria Williams, Laura Cantrell, Freedy Johnston, Peter Holsapple (the db’s) and Freakwater’s Janet Beveridge Bean and Catherine Ann Irwin. Shramm serves as the one-man house band, along with guests David Mansfield, Syd Straw and Beth Orton....

Singer-songwriter-producer Peter Case has a wealth of good friends. The rocker was sideswiped by astronomical medical bills after emergency heart bypass surgery. His friends got word that the musician was without medical insurance, and rallied to put on a benefit to raise funds to offset his expenses. Held at McCabe's in Santa Monica, California, the master of ceremonies T-Bone Burnett, invited comic Eric Idle, singer Katie Melua and folk rock legend Richard Thompson among other surprise guests to the stage on Sunday night . It was the final night in a series of three sold-out shows benefiting Case. Burnett's Sunday night revue also featured Joe Henry, Sam Phillips, Syd Straw, Bob Neuwirth, Carla Olson, Geoff Muldaur, and Case's former...