Last week friend of the site / New Orleans legend @colonelnemo sent me a link to “The Hounds of House Rearden”, the latest episode of the Black List Table Reads podcast on Earwolf. It’s a live-action performance of a werewolf movie script, and an excellent way to pass an amount of time equal to, say, what it would take to assemble two IKEA Kallax shelf units.
Black List Table Reads “takes the best and most exciting screenplays Hollywood hasn’t yet made, and turns them into movies, for your ears”. The scripts are selected by host, narrator (and Black List founder) Franklin Leonard. Each monthly table read is recorded as a group performance by “a rotating cast of talented actors” and then supplemented with audio cues, sounds effects and music. The result is a feature-length audio experience they call an “earmovie”.
“The Hounds of House Rearden” was my first earmovie, and I was impressed. The cast (listed below & pictured even further below) did an excellent job, particularly Cooper Thornton and Greg Itzin. The sound effects and foley work were top notch, rendering the werewolf transformations (spoiler: there are many) and gruesome dismemberments (ditto) effectively. Check this killer poster designed by Erika Deoudes that went up with the podcast post. Details like that have nothing to do with the audio experience but demonstrate the level of care and attention to detail that went into the episode.
The screenplay itself was not bad, as potential werewolf movies go. It started off strong, with a nice antagonistic father-son dynamic and quick pacing, but lost momentum by introducing a few too many dudes with trope-y sub-plots – one of which had me wondering when Mushu was going to appear. There’s a ton of good werewolf action, though, and the identity of the titular Hounds caught me by surprise. I couldn’t find anything else by its screenwriter, Sean Geraghty, but he wrote a better werewolf action-horror movie than some others I could name that made it all the way to the screen.
Subscribe to Black List Table Reads on iTunes or Overcast, or find other links to this specific episode here.
“The Hounds of Rearden” written by Sean Geraghty. It stars Cooper Thornton (Peter), James Callis (Sir Julius/Cortez), Greg Itzin (Sen. Warren/Hunter), Charles Shaughnessy (Cromwell/Clark), Sachin Bhatt (Raj/Ranger #1), Gregg Daniel (Leopold), Andrew Roa (Johnny Napoleon), Ben Lawson (Hastings/Collins), Laura Kai Chen (Khan), and Franklin Leonard (Narrator).
