★★★★★ 0/5

5 star friends

Margaret Pomeranz likens her rapport with David Stratton as "an old married couple without the sex."

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at-the-movies3A TV institution, Margaret Pomeranz share some memories of meeting David Stratton to the Sydney Morning Herald this week:

“A little while after I started at SBS, David Stratton came on board to introduce movies. David doesn’t like to have anything to do with people if he doesn’t know where they fit into his life.’Haughty’ is a good word for him and he was a bit haughty with me until told I was to produce him. Then, he literally embraced me with open arms. As soon as you’ve got an official position in his life, he’s the most generous, wonderful person.

“So we became best mates. We’d go out for lunch, talk about movies and came up with an idea for a show [The Movie Show].

“I was going to produce the show. I’d never thought about [being on camera]. I wanted a male-female combination and had all these wonderful females in mind but David went ‘Nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh!’ to all of them. He said ‘Why don’t you give it a go?’ and I said ‘No, I don’t want to.’ I mean, I’m not beautiful or anything like that and I wasn’t young, even then.”

Still, the SBS suits wanted her on camera, so that was that. She was terrified. “We used to record it really early in the morning and I’d sit there with a glass of whisky to get myself to set foot in the studio. Pathetic.”

On jousting with Stratton: “It’s like we’re an old married couple without the sex,” she says. “It’s a very long-term relationship. I get irritated with him. David is very stubborn. Anything that’s overtly hand-held, he’s got a real thing about that. Anything by Lars von Trier, he’s going to hate. And he’s not mad on sporting movies. I remember being so angry with him for disliking that fabulous documentary When We Were Kings about the Muhammad Ali fight in Zaire. I thought it was fantastic but, because it was about boxing, David didn’t like it.

“I just felt like smacking him.”

Despite the differences, is it fair to say she’s rather fond of the bloke?

She laughs that laugh. “I adore him,” she says.

You can read more at the Sydney Morning Herald.

10 Responses

  1. I watch the show every week.

    Although I don’t go to the movies regularly, I find it useful in being familiar with all the new release films. Because I don’t watch a lot of preview trailers or regularly read the newspaper reviews.

    That is over two hundred films a year I would not otherwise know much about. So it gives me a basic knowledge of the main films released each year.

  3. Excellent show and wouldn’t miss it. I’ve been watching since the SBS days of The Movie Show and really miss that classic old theme and still don’t really like the new western type theme. And Margaret can talk she’s got a bee in her bonet about Dustin Hoffman and hates anything he’s in!!

    And oh yeh that laugh of hers always makes me laugh!

  4. Yeah David talks more about hand held camera, even when the film isnt hand held
    like in The Combination, than anything else these days! Love the show and the pair. Proberbly more popular now than when it was on SBS. Would like to see them present the movies on ABC1,2 at the moment.

  5. Have watched them right from the start. Its uncanny how often I agree exactly with Margaret’s reviews too. Love em both, keep up the good work 🙂

  7. Nice. I love these 2 especially when they disagree haha. Although often you think one of them really hates a movie, they argue a little about it and then they give scores within a half star of each other!

  9. Marget and David are great, the only show worth watching on the ABC, Ive met them both, they introduced themsleves and we talked about how the bad the movies they were doing that week, they were great.

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