You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head and heart and this sweet nostalgia bomb set down roots in a way no one was expecting. Dirty Dancing was among the most rejected scripts in 80's Hollywood, a movie everyone turned down for being too girly in an age where loud guy movies were all the rage. Along came the video distribution giant, Vestron Video, in the middle of a changing market, with designs on producing their own original movies and they gambled on this one for their first feature and boy, did it pay out big. Their first feature became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s and joined a pantheon of classic movie musicals. It's too bad Vestron couldn't recapture that magic as every follow-up picture tanked hard enough to take the entire company down with them.

Dirty Dancing takes place at a Catskills mountain resort in the summer of 1963, right before the violent cultural changes of the 1960s. Baby Houseman is on vacation with her family and falls in with the resort staff who dance the night away when the vacationers all go to bed. She falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle, learns to dance, learns to love, and finds herself at this magical summer retreat. It's schmaltzy. It's naive. It's just what the movies needed in 1987.

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This week we're doing things a little differently. We're taking a look at two crucial queer short films and a feature from the time before the Stonewall Riots forced the gay liberation struggle to the fore.

We're looking at Fireworks, a 1947 avant garde short from one of LA's weirdest guys, Kenneth Anger.

Next up is Picnic, a 1948 silent short from Curt Harrington, director of What's The Matter With Helen.

We wrap things up with Winter Kept Us Warm, the Canadian feature from David Secter. It's an important film in the history of queer cinema as well as Canadian cinema. It was the first Canadian movie to run at Cannes and influenced many Canadian filmmakers that followed.

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Pride 2026 continues with one of this year's most unexpected episodes. At a glance, Making Love is not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on 99 Cent Rental. It's a Hollywood drama. It's a "very important movie". It's from the director of Love Story (and a bunch of other really great movies). But our friend Sean Abley dropped by for what turned into a giant-sized episode of 99 Cent Rental and we go long on one of the most honest and authentic coming-out stories at a critical moment in the 80's just as the gay rights movement was gaining momentum but right before the first reports of AIDS hits the news. It offers a remarkable alternative to contemporary portrayals of gay characters, casting off the well-worn tropes of swishy queens and terrifying leather daddies, Making Love gives you gay men who are simply ordinary men.

Making Love is about married couple Claire and Zach. Their life together is great. Except for one critical thing. Zach is gay and is finally coming to terms with it. He meets author Bart, an openly gay but aloof loner who loves them and leaves them and has his first sexual encounter with a man which sends his entire life into a spiral.

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