"It was was directed Max Ophuls and it stars Robert Ryan as a character who was intended to be based on Howard Hughes. Max Ophuls had been hired by Hughes’ production company, RKO, early to make the film that was actually supposed to be Faith Domergue’s big starring vehicle, and that movie just turned into a disaster. The production of it dragged along over five or six years with many different directors. After Ophuls got fired from it, he got hired to make an adaptation by another company of a novel called Wild Calendar. He told the screenwriter that he was paired with that he didn’t want to actually adapt the novel; he wanted to use the structure of the novel to make a film about how terrible he thought Howard Hughes was. They basically culled the notes of everything that they’d ever heard about Howard Hughes and Ophuls’ personal experiences, and the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, went out and he met women who had had encounters with Hughes and then put it all together in this film which is about a shop girl who gets involved with a mysterious millionaire. The mysterious millionaire’s played by Robert Ryan, who was an actor who made a lot of different kinds of movies, and to a lot of film noir fans and B-Movie, genre film fans, he’s considered a great star, but he really looks like Howard Hughes in a lot of ways. They’re both very tall and lanky and have kind of a similar jaw. Even though Hughes knew this movie was being made – he insisted that he be sent dailies – he asked for some changes so that people wouldn’t think it’s him. The character and the performance are a lot like him. Nowadays, especially given everything we know about Howard Hughes, the similarities are impossible to ignore."

"And then, my fourth one is a comedy, and I was torn between Some Like It Hot, which I love, but my vote went to Spinal Tap, which I thought was more contemporary. It made me feel such an old man, but… One of the things about Spinal Tap — I was doing a documentary [The Long Way Home] about Russian rock and roll in, I don’t know, the late ’80s or something like that, and it was about a Russian band coming — it was around Glasnost when they came across to America to make the record, and it was about Glasnost, and the co-production, as it were, saw the closing of the gap between East and West, as it were. That’s what it set out to be, but it turned out to be a disaster. Not the film, but the whole object of the enterprise, because it split the band up, and the Russian band never made another record. They were completely disoriented by being in the West and all that. So it was one of those documentaries where what you set out to do, you don’t do, and you do something else, which is usually better than what you were going to do. The point of the story is that I showed them Spinal Tap. They fell about, and they couldn’t speak a word of English, but they absolutely got it. It was just, again, the power of the humor and the power of the images, and all this kind of stuff. I mean, we were in common ground — they never understood a word of it, but they were just laughing as much I would laugh every time I saw it. That was a kind of interesting experience for me, to see how universal films can be."