Night Shift

What a wonderful person.

I also have to say, I loved Night Shift very much.

That was a big movie for me growing

up.

Welcome to Movie Microscope.

Today's episode is Night Shift.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the latest movie, Microscope.

My name is Nick Nunziata, and I'm your gracious host alongside me, the mountainous, terrain-induced, good old crevice-loving Justin White.

See who makes the breaks, dude.

Today we're talking about Hughie.

1982's Night Shift.

Why did you want to do this movie? It seems like an odd choice to me.

So Opie Cunningham had made like a couple of short films, directed a couple of TV episodes.

Um, I think he had directed like one other film, and then Night Shift.

And Night Shift was huge.

We actually did an episode, um, over at A Film By.

Jeff and I talked about that.

Um, absolutely bonkers movie.

[laughs] Um, and Brian Grazer had actually brought Splash to him first, and Ron Howard was like, "Nope, I wanna make an R-rated movie first." And then we'll talk about this, you know, PG mermaid thing you got going on.

Um, so after Night Shift, like he had some cred and, and was, you know, kind of building that respect and people were kind of willing to, to hire him.

him.

Wrote Night Shift, Laverne and Shirley, and actually got created by credit for Joanie Loves Chachi.

Okay, so he's got...

So he was part of Happy Days.

In 1982, Ron Howard had his directorial breakthrough with the comedy film Night Shift.

The movie did well at the box office, was generally liked but not loved by critics, and, according to a contemporary TV Guide review, Winkler turns in the best performance of his career, and Keaton is wonderful.

However, the longest-lasting legacy of this film is probably the role it played in raising $3 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

The film's closing credits sequence features a song performed by Rod Stewart and written by husband and third wife duo Burt Bacharach and Carol Bayer Sager.

By their powers combined, Stewart, Bacharach, and Sager made a track so powerful that it was destined to live and die on the Night Shift soundtrack, if not for the intervention of former Bacharach and Hal David collaborator, Dionne Warwick.

Bacharach and Warwick had not collaborated since the dissolution of Bacharach and David's partnership in 1973, and this song served as their reunion.

Quote, That's how intertwined we've been, said Warwick.

We can talk about the movie that I didn't watch.