Collection: Rhonda Shear is "Up All Night"

Her trademark manner of speaking the show's title by raising her voice an octave when saying the word "Up" became a catchphrase.

Curated by Claire Donner

Total Runtime: 0:21:56

USA Up All Night (also known as Up All Night and Up All Night with Rhonda Shear) is an American cable television series that aired weekly on Friday and Saturday nights on the USA Network. The show aired from 1989 to 1998.

Synopsis

The program consisted of low-budget films, bookended by in-studio or on-location comedy skits featuring the show's hosts. In addition to skits, the hosts would also provide sardonic comments about the featured film(s), and observations on various Hollywood- and/or New York City-area clubs and attractions (when the series was shooting out of studio).

The movies aired ranged from cult classics, to B movies, to other fare not appearing on television frequently. Up All Night would regularly show sexploitation films, with the explicit content edited out.

Cancellation

In 1998, USA came under the new management of Barry Diller, and decided to go for a more general and upscale type of viewer. This meant many of USA's long-running series were either overhauled or canceled – Up All Night ended up among the latter. The network relieved Shear and Gottfried of their hosting duties (while still showing the Up All Night imagery before/after commercial breaks), and began airing re-runs of mainstream films that appealed to a broader audience. Eventually, the Up All Night name, music, and graphics were completely removed from the films.

Rhonda Shear (born November 12, 1954) is an American television personality, comedienne, and actress.

Shear is best known for her role as a host of the USA Network's 1980s/'90s weekend B-movie show, USA Up All Night. From 1991 to 1998 she hosted in-studio and on-location segments that aired on Friday (and later moved to Saturday) nights, replacing comedian Caroline Schlitt (the Friday night host for the show's first few years). Her trademark manner of speaking the show's title - by raising her voice an octave when saying the word "Up"...became a catch phrase. Shear also briefly hosted a comedy program called "Spotlight Cafe," hosted previously by comic Judy Tenuta.

In June 1991, Shear returned to Playboy appearing in the Funny Girls pictorial published by the magazine, with fewer clothes this time. In October 1993 she appeared in her own Playboy pictorial titled "Rhonda Up All Night".

Collection: Night Flight

clips from the classic 80s-90s new wave variety show Night Flight

Curated by Harris Smith

Total Runtime: 0:37:06

From Wikipedia:

Night Flight is a variety show that originated on the USA Network. An eclectic mix of short films, cartoons, B movies, stand up comedy, documentaries, music videos and more, Night Flight was broadcast, in various incarnations, from 1981 to 1996.

In issue #77 of the entertainment magazine Boston Rock, Night Flight's Director of Programming Stuart Samuels, was interviewed about the show. He is introduced as having a doctorate in the History Of Ideas, having been a former professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, a teacher of annual seminars at the Cannes Film Festival, and as the author of a book on cult film classics titled Midnight Movies. He describes their intention as wanting to "...put the videos together in some kind of thematic categories...so that the videos were saying something to each other and were letting the audience make conclusions from them." He also states that they never felt in competition with MTV, as they wanted to be; "...a little more selective... intelligent and... stimulating." He claims they were the first to put director's names on the videos, interview the bands, create band profiles, show uncensored videos and longform 12" remix videos; as well as the first to put together politically oriented shows about subjects like apartheid in South Africa. He states that their intention was not to be "...heavy-handed, but do 'here's-something-that's-in-the-news' shows". Samuels and the interviewer also speak of a backlash against the stagnation and repetition of rock video (circa 1986), which inspired Night Flight to program even more animation, cult and camp films. Samuels also gives the background of Senior Producer Stuart Shapiro as having run a company that was instrumental in the distribution of cult, midnight movie and campy films like Tunnelvision.