Radio producer Debra West likened the Saturday night show "The Director's Cut" to a Thanksgiving meal.
"The movie is the turkey of the radio show. Boobs are the cranberry sauce - we talk about those a lot," she said. "Davenport's 'Pick of the Week' would be the pumpkin pie. You go to the meal, and you eat it all, but what you really wanted was the pumpkin pie. Mindless banter about everything else in the world would be all those other types of Thanksgiving-y foods on the table."
Dan Gutierrez, Aaron Davenport, Ollie Riggle and Debra West host the weekly radio show, which focuses on films.
It's popular with male cinema junkies, UNM student West said.
The show, going on four years, is played on FM stations and Internet radio around the world. "The Director's Cut" is also a podcast, available at TheDirectorsCutRadio.com. It streams live Saturdays from 5 to 7 p.m. Shows are uploaded each Monday or Tuesday.
"We're not exactly sure why anyone actually listens," West said. "We haven't really figured that out yet. We're doing something right, but we don't know what it is. We're really unpretentious, and we know we don't know what we're doing. We have a few stations that play us live. We'll get calls from Chicago. There's one station that plays us every morning for their morning show. What, are they nuts?"
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Davenport picks a movie each week to talk about, and he's got a magic eye for finding so-bad-it's-good movies. He judges movies by their box covers.
"In a weird way, it's kind of like a horrible gift, I guess you'd say," Davenport said. "There could be a lineup of 10 movies and, in about 10 seconds, I could probably pick out the worst one. I don't know how I do it, but they usually are horrible."
Gutierrez started the show while working for local station 106.3 KAGM, a few weeks before "Star Wars: Episode III" came out, he said.
"I was basically their Web guy. I was kind of begging the general manager to let me have a show on their station at a late-night hour. He finally said 'yeah,' and I decided to put together a little movie radio show," he said. "It started doing well until the station decided to flip and become a country station. We got fired and everybody else got fired.. We got picked up by a station in Phoenix, and since then we've started adding more FM stations, HD stations and Internet radio stations to our roster."
Davenport keeps his thumb on the pulse of the local film scene, but he has yet to be blown away. Most bad films made in town aren't bad enough to be good, he said.
"There's far too much talent in this town to be wasting on really bad horror movies, and that seems to be all Albuquerque produces," Davenport said. "Each one that gets made is worse than the last. It's almost like they're making movies to benefit their own select group of friends. Maybe nobody wants to take themselves seriously. In "Romeo and Juliet vs. the Living Dead," it's supposed to be set in fair Verona, and there's a scene in the movie that has them standing on a ranch, and there's a big sign that says 'Welcome to Placitas, N.M.'"
They air the show out of a small guest-house-turned-broadcast-headquarters.
"It's like a semicircle of microphones, and I'm in the center - I have the nicest chair out of everyone," West said. "Davenport's usually playing video games and looking at dirty photos, and Ollie's, generally, he's paying good attention to the show. Dan - just the show. I look at pictures of cats."
