LATE-BREAKING BLOCKBUSTER NEWS!

Wildly Popular 'Iron Man' Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

Bless you, Larry Aydlette, for the tip!

JOE DANTE, YOUR MOVIE ORGY M.C.

MORE UPDATES! THURSDAY APRIL 17!


Last Friday, April 4, before I was briefly sidelined, I had the privilege of visiting Joe Dante in his office on the Warner Hollywood lot to talk about the movies he’s programmed as the curator of the Dante’s Inferno film festival at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. The festival is now nearing its midpoint, with lots of great stuff still waiting in the wings (or hanging from the rafters), and it was great fun sitting down to talk with one of my filmmaking favorites, someone who represents to me a perfect encapsulation and expression of the kind of movie fan, like myself, who grew up believing he was the only one who felt so strongly about the movies. In Dante’s case, he grew up to make terrific entertainments and the occasional masterpiece based on a pop culture-fed sensibility that has never been satisfied to regurgitate familiar bits and pieces, as well as maddeningly precise arcana, for its nostalgic appeal. Dante fuses pop, politics, satire and a bracing yet benign cynicism and enriches movies that in other hands might be rote projects-for-hire with a distinct point of view on the world. It is a mistake to think of The ‘burbs, for example, as simply a Tom Hanks comedy—that movie has barely hidden under its zany façade a cackling, dark streak worthy of Brian De Palma, and a surgically precise critique of its own audience laying in wait for anyone casual enough to think the movie won’t bite. And in simply magnificent movies like Explorers and Gremlins 2: The New Batch Dante redefines the boundaries of the genre film, exploding the old wineskin (in the case of G2) or turning it inside out, as in Explorers, which refashions the conventions of his mentor Steven Spielberg into something uniquely magical, uniquely expectation-busting, uniquely Dante. Dante’s movies are infectiously entertaining, and so is the director in person; he’s a virtual oracle of cinematic knowledge, as well as a genuinely friendly, generous and affable person. And just try to keep up with the references he accesses like breaths of air-- to do so is to indulge in a futile, but heady pursuit. There just aren’t many who can keep up with Joe Dante. Best not to try. Better to just let him roll and convince you of the unexpected joys of some of the most unlikely movies you probably never heard of. Trust me; you’ll have a great time. We begin by talking about his legendary project The Movie Orgy, which screens as the festival’s closing-night feature.

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DC: Let’s talk about The Movie Orgy. I recalled hearing something about it several years ago, but when it was announced on the New Beverly schedule, to be honest I wasn’t even sure what it was.

JD: I’m not sure what it is either! (Laughs)

DC: Is it something that is constantly evolving?

JD: It was constantly evolving from 1968 to about 1977, and it’s hard to explain exactly what it is. It started out as Camp Movie Night at the Philadelphia College of Art. The Batman serial had just been released, the 1943 serial, which really astonished a lot of people because they’d never seen anything that racist before. It was all run in one sitting, so it was, like, five hours. People camped out, had a party, got pizza—it was a lot of fun. So serials had come back-- the whole idea of watching serials had come back. And I had all this extra footage—I was collecting films, all these pieces and bits, and I decided to run this Bela Lugosi serial, The Phantom Creeps, interspersed with other footage. Sometimes we would cut stuff directly into the serial. Anyway, it was pretty popular, and it eventually evolved into a somewhat more complex version that ran at NYU in 1968. It was a tremendous success—people were hanging off the rafters—and there had been an admission charge, so there was quite a bit of money. And while we were running it at Columbia University, somebody from Schlitz Beer came and said, “We would like to take this around on a tour of college campuses. We’ll give you $100 a night, you run the film and we sell beer.” So we said, “Okay!” And by now the thing was seven hours long, and at that point we couldn’t afford—What we would do is, we would legitimately rent three features. So we had one projector that ran the feature, and when it came to a dull part we would go to another projector, which had all kinds of odds and ends on it, and we’d run that we’d spun down into the next part of the feature that was interesting. But that got to be very time-consuming and very complicated, so we ended up just buying features and cutting them up. Ultimately, we had this seven-hour movie orgy that ran from coast to coast. And it was a product of its time—it was 1968, it was very political, very anti-military, very antiestablishment, it was in terrible taste (Laughs). But it also appealed to the nostalgic in baby boomers, because a lot of the TV shows we used were things they hadn’t seen since they were kids—this stuff wasn’t as readily available as it is now. They’d see this stuff, and they were in seventh heaven. They would react to things like a clip from an old TV show—everybody would “ooh!” and “ahh!” When Peter Graves says in Beginning of the End, “You can’t drop an atom bomb on Chicago!” it brought down the house, because the Chicago riots had just happened. So it was very much something of its time. The problem was that, as the Schlitz people told us, “Sometimes the kids don’t get some of the older stuff. Can’t you put some newer stuff in there?” So we would change it up and put in new things occasionally. But there was an interesting development. The newer shows, like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Flintstones, were self-aware, and they weren’t as funny as the movies of the past that were sincerely trying to say something and not doing it well. As soon as they got self-aware, the material wasn’t as funny. So eventually it got to the point where we just started filling it up with stuff that I didn’t think was funny and eventually abandoned it. In the meantime, we had one print and flew it to college campuses all over the country—we actually hired somebody to do it for us because Jon Davison and I were now working for Roger Corman and we didn’t have time to go off and follow it around. I would say it must have played every university in the country over a ten-year period.

DC: The way you put it together—

JD: It was put together with spit and glue. We only had one print and one splicer! There was no mixing, there was no color correction—whatever condition the film was in was what we had to work with We had to constantly refocus because it was all on different film stocks. And any kind of funny juxtaposition that we could make had to be done with the existing soundtrack, which meant sometimes we’d have to cut things so that the overlap from the previous shot was the joke when it overlapped the next shot.

DC: The whole project speaks to a very specific kind of film love. Today, with an AVID you could do something similar, but without the sweat and the inspiration.

JD: No, this is completely different. This is made with human hands. We called it A 2001 Splice Odyssey. But I don’t know what people will make of it today. I really don’t. I do remember at the time that some people said it was the greatest movie they’d ever seen, but that may have been because they were ingesting controlled substances (Laughs).

DC: Did you try to be really pointed in the way you juxtaposed images and sounds, or was it a more random kind of jumble to see what would shake out? Because, having not yet seen it myself, it almost sounds like a primitive form of film as film criticism.

JD: Sometimes there were definite political points or jokes. And it does have a certain sort of meta-critic element. But I haven’t seen it with an audience in 30 years. So it’ll be very interesting to see what their reaction is.

DC Especially the reaction of an audience who, over 30 years, has been exposed to a lot of random image juxtaposition that has seeped into the ways movies are now made and seen.

JD: Although I will say I think there’s things in The Movie Orgy that they’ve never seen. And it’s free, so they’d better get there early.

DC: You used to write for Famous Monsters of Filmland.

JD: Well, I wrote a letter to Famous Monsters which they printed as an article. But I used to write for Castle of Frankenstein. That was the competition.

DC: Did you just inundate them with material until they sat up and noticed?

JD: Well, everybody wrote to Famous Monsters. I wrote tons of letters trying to get my name in print. That was the whole deal. The coolest thing in the world was to get your name in Famous Monsters. I wrote all sorts of laundry lists—the best movies I ever saw, etc., etc. The worst movies I ever saw, that’s the one they printed—the 50 worst movies of all time, some of which I hadn’t seen. (I was 13.) So that was my first published stuff, although I think Forry (Famous Monsters founder Forrest J. Ackerman) put my name in earlier—I would send him tidbits. But it wasn’t until I was writing for Cal Beck at Castle of Frankenstein that I was really writing.

DC: It was at least consistent work?

JD: Well, they didn’t pay you anything. I handed in reviews and stuff like that. Eventually I criticized an article they had done about movies on TV and they said, “Why don’t you do a real survey of all the horror movies on TV? Start with A, B, C--” So they turned it into an ongoing thing that was in every other issue. I think I got up to “R” and the magazine went out of business.

DC: Some play fantasy baseball. Some play fantasy football. Were you one of these kids, like I was, who would sit at home and program their fantasy drive-in calendars or weekend Creature Feature double bills?

JD: Oh, sure! I collected movie ads. I would cut them out of the paper and make up different double bills. I did all that stuff.

DC: I know when I was growing up I assumed I was the only one.

JD: That was the great thing about Famous Monsters. The appearance of that magazine made a lot of kids realize they weren’t alone. There was a network of people who were interested in all the things they were interested in that no one else around them was. You can look back on it and say, well, it wasn’t much of a magazine, which it really wasn’t. But the transformative effect, the unifying effect that it had on an entire generation was amazing.

DC: It seems you can’t find anyone who’s of a certain age in this business, whether it’s writing, effects, directing, who didn’t read that magazine at some point.

JD: Remember, when that magazine came out, there were no magazines like it. In 1958 alone there were five or six different competitors that put out similar magazines, and from 1958-60 there were tons-- World Famous Creatures, Monster Parade and all these imitations. Then there was Horror Monsters and Mad Monsters, which was really cheap, printed on really crappy paper, and they lasted quite a while.

DC: Where did you go to school? Where did the Movie Orgy get its start?

JD: I was in Livingston, New Jersey, for quite a while, and then we moved to Parsippany in 1957, which was not nearly as good a place to live because it wasn’t centrally located, it didn’t have a neighborhood theater so you had to go far away to see movies. And the kids there were not my kind of kids, so I probably became even more insular there. That’s when I started making home movies. Then I went to the Philadelphia College of Art.

DC: Is that where you hooked up with Jon Davison?

JD: Yes. He was actually still in high school then. We met at a science fiction society that met in Philadelphia. Isaac Asimov used to show up there all the time. We would go to that together sometimes, but mostly we just went to the movies.

DC: Was it you and he that developed The Movie Orgy?

JD: Yeah. He was sort of the entrepreneur. He got it out to the public. He’s the one who came out to Los Angeles first, in 1973, to work for Roger Corman, on the recommendation of Martin Scorsese, who was one of his teachers at NYU. It was another friend of ours, Jonathan Kaplan, that actually came out here first. Roger would go to Marty and say, “Who’s coming up that I can use?” So Jon eventually asked me to come out here and work on trailers, and Allan Arkush and I became the New World Pictures trailer department. Instead of them hiring piecemeal editors and having to tell them what to do, we could tell them our style and then we’d just do it. For a number of years we did that, and then we finally asked Roger to let us make a movie. He said, “You have to keep making trailers! Make the movie like you make the trailers—cheap and short.” So we made Hollywood Boulevard, sort of a New World home movie.

DC: Hollywood Boulevard is one of those movies—

JD: That not many people saw! (Laughs)

DC: I always dreamed of seeing it in a drive-in.

JD: It didn’t play very many places.

DC: But it’s such a great time capsule of that sensibility and that period of ‘70s B-movie exploitation.

JD: Well, it’s really a home movie for us. All our friends are in it. It’s like a documentary. (Laughs)

DC: Is there anyone else besides Roger Corman who you met here who you’d say really influenced your sensibility, your point of view, or the direction your career ended up taking?

JD: Well, Spielberg, of course, but that was later. I sort of had a career by that time. But when I met Roger, like everybody who went to work for him, I had no credentials. I hadn’t even worked in 35 millimeter before, ever. I was locked in a room with a 35mm Moviola—that’s how we learned to do trailers. That’s how it worked. And if you can, you go on. If you can’t, you go into some other line of work.

DC: Was there a certain amount of fear in getting started this way?

JD: No, I don’t think so. I was too young and dumb to be afraid. I think, honestly, I said to myself, if I can’t do this, I’ll become a film critic or a cartoonist or something. When I took on my first directing job, it was really to see if I could do it. Because editing is a very solitary job; you do it almost in a vacuum. Movie directing, on the other hand, is a very social job, and if you’re not comfortable around people, as a lot of editors and writers aren’t, it becomes very wearing to have to deal with all these people. But I found that I enjoyed it.

DC: I often find myself thinking about what it was like to watch movies in a time before we knew everything about them, before they were so readily available, and almost every time I see a movie that I really love on a big screen, I started realizing there’s a lot to be said for delayed gratification.

JD: (Laughs)

DC: “Oh, my God, I waited three months to see this thing, and here it is.” The experience is so much different now when everything is just a download away.


JD: It’s a different world. People who didn’t grow up in the era we did can’t understand how long we would usually have to wait to see films. If something appeared in theaters in 1960, it wasn’t going to be on TV for at least five years. And if it was, it’d be sold to the networks and run once, cut, panned-and-scanned, all that. You couldn’t see ‘Scope movies for years. They were lost for decades until, partly through the efforts of the DGA, people started realizing that there’s more to the picture. People would complain about seeing Manhattan on TV and say, “Well, when I saw it in the theater everybody had legs!” There was an attempt to get people to understand that they were seeing more in theaters. Now it’s pretty hard to find a picture that's been released panned-and-scanned and not have a ‘Scope version, although Universal managed to do it with Colossus the Forbin Project. They actually put out a pan-and-scan DVD with no wide-screen version and never revisited it. Columbia tried it with Castle Keep, and Martin Scorsese and others made a big stink about it and they had to put out a wide-screen version. We take it for granted now, but in the old days if you missed them in a theater, chances are they’d turn up on some UHF channel at midnight, you’d check in TV Guide, and there were no VCRS, so you had to stay up. But there was a satisfaction to being a movie hound and finding these things.

DC: You had to work for it a little bit.

JD: The only problem was when you’d stay up really late, start to watch it, and then fall asleep. (Laughs)

DC: This makes me think of the first time I ever ran into you. You were doing a lecture at the Academy on horror films.

JD: I remember. That’s the night I dropped all my notes.

DC: (Laughs) Well, you didn’t present yourself incoherently. My best friend and I were there, and at some point in the lecture you dropped format altogether and said, “You know what? I’ve got this clip from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly…

JD: (Laughing)

DC: …and it would be horrible if I didn’t take advantage of this big screen, so sit back and relax.” And we end up watching the graveyard scene from the end of the movie with Tuco running the perimeter. And I remember thinking, “If this guy never makes another good movie, he’s still top-notch in my book for doing this!” It’s one of those things—20 years down the line, when The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is available everywhere you turn, such a moment might not have quite the zing, but—

JD: But it’s still the big screen.

DC: Exactly. And I’m sure I hadn’t at that point, ever seen it on the big screen before, so seeing even just that little morsel was really exciting. And speaking of excitement, we’re about midway through the Dante’s Inferno film festival at the New Beverly. All reports have been that it’s been a great success. What’s left on the schedule?


JD: The Sadist runs through Tuesday. That’s an early film of Vilmos Zsigmond’s, and he will be there on the last night (Tuesday). Larry Cohen will be there all three nights for The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. The first time I heard Larry talk about that movie was at Filmex in 1977, when this thing came out. I had never seen a man wearing more jewelry.

(Both Laughing)

DC I caught the last half hour of The Sadist on TCM some months back, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

JD: It’s one of those movies that comes from a bucket of slime—these people make all these awful movies, and all of the sudden it just coalesces and they make their Casablanca. Everything in the picture works. It’s a brilliant little movie, and almost nobody has seen it. I saw it when it was new on a double bill with The Devil’s Messenger. I had to go to one of the most dangerous theaters in North Philadelphia to see it— it was an all-black theater in a time of great tension—and I got so swept up in the movie I forgot where I was.

DC: The Secret Invasion and Tomb of Ligeia.

JD: Well, I couldn’t do a series without having Roger in there. He’s gonna come down to the New Beverly on the second day (April 17). I haven’t seen Secret Invasion since it came out, and I remember it being awfully good. There is a print… hopefully! (Laughs). And I know the Ligeia print is good because I had it printed in 1980-something and it’s only played festivals, so it should be in pretty good shape.

DC: As I understand it, there’s some question as to whether the New Beverly is going to be able to secure a print of Wrong is Right.

JD: Well, I don’t think they’re going to be able to, and I may have to run it off of DVD. But I do want to run it because I think it’s a totally neglected movie. My jaw dropped when I watched it and I went, “Where is this movie going?!” When I saw it in 1982 I said, “I don’t get it. It’s just a bunch of… stuff. But now all that stuff has coalesced into our dangerous present. There’s so many elements of this picture that ring true today that I really think it’s worth rediscovering.

DC: It puts me in mind of the way Network seemed so prescient. And it makes me think of your movie The Second Civil War too. It’s a great, nasty, tough movie, and truthfully, I’ll jump at anything that has Elizabeth Pena in it.

JD: Oh, she’s great. The Second Civil War was the best cast I ever had.

(The New Beverly has still not announced what the second feature to play with Wrong Is Right will be—they’re billing it as a “mystery movie”—but I have a feeling that Joe, unlike Monty Hall, would never put a goat behind Door No. 2. – Dennis)

DC: I saw Blood on Satan’s Claw at the Cinematheque last summer, and that’s a real stunner on the big screen.

JD: It’s probably the same print we’ll be running. It’s really a beautifully photographed movie—such an atmosphere to it.


DC: And at the risk of my horror fan credentials, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Horror Express.

JD: Oh, well, Horror Express is a must-see. You cannot miss it. It’s one of the best Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee movies of all time.

DC: Which really is saying something.

JD: They are both great in it. It’s got a sense of humor, it’s got a really neat story, which borrows a bit from various other stories you might have heard before. It’s a spirited picture, a hell of a lot of fun.

DC: Who directed it?

JD: A guy named Eugenio Martin. He’s a Spanish director. This was part of a series made by a company named Scotia International—they made a lot of westerns, like Bad Man’s River, and Psychomania, the one with George Sanders. I think Horror Express is a wonderful picture. It’s so entertaining.

And then The Movie Orgy, which is going to be interesting. It may just sit there like a lox. Maybe people won’t relate to it.

DC: It’ll just be interesting to see how a modern audience used to Internet mash-ups and lots and lots of imagistic input will react to it. Will it test the boundaries of, for lack of a better crass generalization, the ADD generation?

JD: Well, this is the original attention-deficit movie because it was designed to be walked out on. The idea was you could go out, get a smoke, get a pizza, come back and you haven’t missed anything ‘cause it’s just a bunch of stuff. And if you missed something, you won’t know it.

DC: I’ll be interested to see if audiences relate to its uniqueness as much today as they did in the past.

JD: I don’t think there’s a lot of material in it that’s been used by other people. There’s a lot of old TV shows that will be completely foreign to a lot of people, like Andy’s Gang. This is a show that is so bizarre. The concept that this is really happening in reality is almost impossible to believe. It’s the strangest thing ever. And there’s Tales of the Texas Rangers and all these other shows that I saw when I was a kid—my generation, when I was in college, these were their memories. This generation doesn’t know any of this stuff. So you either strike them as absurd and amusing or simply as incredibly stupid.

DC: You risk turning into Stuntman Mike trying to impress the girls at the end of the bar.

JD: Yeah, exactly! But there’s some cool stuff in there. The fun used to be, when it was seven hours—now it’s four and something—it had rotating movies. We had I Was a Teenage Werewolf in for a while. We had College Confidential with Steve Allen, which is hilarious. We had Little Shop of Horrors for a while, and The Raven and a whole bunch of different things, and they would end up getting swapped out for other pictures later. Now, of the stories that concurrently run through the entire thing, there’s really only four or five movies, but there used to be seven or eight different stories going on simultaneously, sometimes with the same actors, dressed the same. Morris Ankrum, when he plays a general, always dresses the same way. So you can cut him in and it looks like he’s fighting six different monsters!

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The once-in-a-lifetime experience that is The Movie Orgy is the closing night selection of Dante’s Inferno at the New Beverly Cinema, April 22. Joe and everyone at the theater advises that if you want to get in, arriving early is a must. And remember, it’s free! My thanks to Joe Dante for taking the time to sit down with me and flesh out some of the great experiences waiting to be had as the second week of Dante’s Inferno gets under way. I’m sorry I had to miss the first week, but I’m all better now, so I’ll see you there!

For now, some thoughtful person shot some video of Edgar Wright and Joe on the opening night of the festival. Edgar introduces Joe, Joe talks up Mondo Cane and Zulu, and the whole thing makes me glad for YouTube but also pains me that I couldn’t be there. If you missed last week, enjoy these videos and get ready for another terrific week of Dante-picked treasures.



Edgar Wright introduces Joe Dante on the first night of the Dante’s Inferno festival at the New Beverly



Joe waxes rhapsodic over Mondo Cane



Joe gets the New Beverly crowd ready for the wide-screen spectacle of Zulu

UPDATE! April 15, 6:10 p.m. For those who couldn't be there, here are more great clips from YouTube straight from the New Beverly. To my great dismay, my personal situation has prevented me from attending any of the screenings so far, so I am particularly grateful to the person shooting this video and posting it for our enjoyment. I sincerely intend to be there this weekend for Wrong is Right, and I hope that the wild horses of the past week will not be strong enough to drag me away from The Movie Orgy Tuesday night! I'm keeping my fingers crossed. For now, enjoy this great clips!



Joe introduces Hollywood Boulevard



The Hollywood Boulevard Q&A (pt. 1)



The Hollywood Boulevard Q&A (pt. 2)



Joe and Jonathan Kaplan introduce Truck Turner

UPDATE Wednesday 4/16/08: Final results of the Joe Dante’s Best Movie poll reveal that 51% (68 votes) of those who chimed in think, not surprisingly, I suppose, that Gremlins deserves the title. Coming in second with a robust 39% (53 votes) was The Howling, followed by Gremlins 2: The New Batch at 33% (44 votes). The rather robust showing for Matinee (31%, 42 votes) shows that a whole lot more folks than just me would love to see a new DVD of this one, with the requisite extras and Dante commentary, of course, sooner than later. Innerspace and The ‘burbs both chalked up 19% (26 votes), while Explorers racked up 15% (21 votes). Piranha managed 16 votes, for 12%, and my beloved Hollywood Boulevard even got 15 votes, for 11%. All the other candidates, and worthy ones they all are (I highly recommend Runaway Daughters if you haven’t seen it yet), gathered little but a sliver of the vote.

UPDATE: Thursday 4/17/08: More video clips from the Dante's Inferno festival! I'll be there to see them with my own eyes Friday, but if there are more clips by then, you'll see 'em here! Let's see... What have we got today?...



Joe introduces The Sadist



Joe and Vilmos Zsigmond after the screening of The Sadist



Larry Cohen introduces The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover

A FUND-RAISER FOR D.K. HOLM

It does seem as though there’s always something waiting in the wings to keep things in perspective for us all. At a time when every week seems to bring stories of film writers losing their jobs, film critic D.K. Holm finds himself facing an entirely different reality, one that some of us could just as easily be staring down. Word comes from the The Oregonian’s Shawn Levy that Holm is suffering from a very treatable form of esophageal cancer. “Very treatable” is a good thing. But the fact that, like many Americans, he is uninsured, and as such finds himself facing potentially huge hospital and treatment bills in order to fight the disease, is an overwhelming concern. (Holm characterizes his dilemma as “the American nightmare.”)

Holm is a colleague of mine and an e-mail acquaintance; we have corresponded several times since the initiation of this blog, yet despite his Oregon orientation we have never met. His writing is energetic, exasperating and vital, often bearing the marks of a true film curmudgeon (Levy’s word), and his voice is one with which I enjoy agreeing and arguing. You may also be familiar with his work, especially if you pay attention to GreenCine Daily or Kevin Smith’s Quick Stop Entertainment. But even if you’re not, there’s a fund-raiser happening in Portland which you can attend (if you're in the Pacific Northwest), or to which you can make a contribution that will directly alleviate some of the struggles Holm will likely be dealing with in the very near future. It’s called ”Help D.K. Holm”, it’s happening at Portland’s Cinema 21, and it gets under way on Sunday, April 27, at 7:00 p.m. This site will tell you all the details, including an address where you can donate to a fund which will help level the financial mountain Holm will have to climb as he makes his recovery.

I hope if you are so moved to send a little something along to help D.K. (a.k.a. Doug) in his time of need that you will do so.

DANTE'S INFERNO OPENS TONIGHT!

Happy Dante’s Inferno day! I just wanted to take a moment or two to remind anyone and everyone in the Los Angeles area that tonight is the official opening night of Joe Dante’s Dante’s Inferno film festival at the beloved New Beverly Cinema. Joe will be there tonight, introduced by none other than Edgar “The Wright Stuff” Wright, and the gentlemen will kick off a hair-raising double bill of Mondo Cane, the original provocative reality documentary, and Cy Endfield’s Zulu, a spectacular adventure starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker that does not get as much exposure, big screen or not, as it deserves. So to see it unspool in wide screen, in the presence Mssrs. Dante and Wright this evening, should be a singular treat.

For those waiting patiently (and some not so patiently) for my interview with Joe Dante, I had planned to have it up and running today—it’s sitting there in my digital recorder ready and waiting to be transcribed and edited. However, life has intervened in an annoying and unexpected way, causing the post to be postponed by a couple of days. First of all, a new round of classes has started this week and I have to make sure I keep up on my reading, which bites a big chunk out of time I have set aside to work on the interview. But more pressing even than that, I ended up spending the day on a bed in the E.R. yesterday after it was determined that my blood sugar levels were on their way to Saturn. Further monitoring is on the way, to be sure, but the problem is extremely treatable. In other words, time I could have spent earning a living or studying or editing the interview was instead whiled away watching a Dodger game from a hospital gurney with an I.V. jammed into my hand. (And you know what? Considering the way the Dodgers have been playing this series with Arizona, being close to immediate medical attention is probably not a bad idea.)

So stick with me, make sure to check the New Beverly Cinema schedule for updates on the film festival, and keep watching—the Joe Dante interview is coming in the next day or so, I promise!

2, 4, 6, 8, WHO DO WE MOST APPRECIATE? BEARS! BEARS! BEARS!

Play ball! Well, so far the Dodgers look like the Dodgers, even under the tutelage of Joe Torre, who must, with hitting coach Don Mattingly, find a way to wake up the sleepy bats. Otherwise, the story of the first week of baseball is, when will the highly touted Detroit Tigers win their first game? And Baltimore (5-1) and Kansas City (4-2) need to take a picture of those standings, because they may not remain that way for long.

Baseball still plays well at SLIFR, if last week’s poll counts for anything (and it doesn’t). Of the seven films specifically listed, two emerged neck-and-neck victors, with The Bad News Bears inching out 22 votes (25%) over Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham (20 for 23%). The only other movie to make a real wave was the tepid (sorry!) fantasy of Field of Dreams, which garnered 17 votes for 19%. Eight Men Out managed only 8 votes (9%), and The Natural, which I find tends to appeal to the same baseball/movie fan that likes Field of Dreams, took only 7 votes (8%). Cobb, not a movie anyone is likely to take to his or her ashen, bitter heart (though I have), grabbed a paltry 3 votes (3%). But that’s better than did The Pride of the Yankees. Has this movie fallen out of favor while I wasn’t looking? No luck, and not a single vote, for Gary Cooper and Babe Ruth in Sam Wood’s sentimental classic.

P.S. It’s busy in the real world today, but those looking for the Joe Dante interview will be satisfied soon. I’m projecting to have it edited and posted sometime tonight, in anticipation of the official start of the Dante’s Inferno film festival tomorrow night at the New Beverly Cinema. I think I’m looking forward to reading it as much as some of you!

P.P.S. Got my grades yesterday. Pass, pass, pass! Whew!

CHARLTON HESTON FLEES THE MADHOUSE 1924-2008

Charlton Heston wore his Republican tails proudly in a largely liberal Hollywood, but he always meant more to me than his politics might have suggested. How could he not be for a generation who grew up watching him save our souls in The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, and then our very lives in thrillers and disaster movies like Soylent Green, Skyjacked, The Omega Man, Earthquake! and of course, Airport '75 ("Climb, baby, climb!")? I will remember him most fondly from Touch of Evil and what he did to help Orson Welles get that directing job; as the arrogant, ambitious, misguided Major Dundee; watching Woodstock and mouthing the dialogue in The Omega Man; and of course, his most memorable role in arguably his best movie, as Taylor in Planet of the Apes. And I say without reservation, NRA president and the face of right-wing Republican Hollywood or not, he did not deserve the treatment he got in Bowling for Columbine.

R.I.P., Charlton Heston.

BURN, BABY, BURN!!! DANTE'S INFERNO!!! The Joe Dante Film Festival April 9-22

What is it about the spring and the New Beverly Cinema? Last year, just around this time, the Torgans (Sherman and Michael), along with ace grindhouse experts Brian Quinn and Eric Caidin, joined forces with no less than Quentin Tarantino who provided access to his own vault of prints and presented Grindhouse 2007. The festival served as both a two-month-long brush-up on the kinds of movies that informed the sensibilities of Tarantino and partner Robert Rodriguez, but also set the stage as a unique nightly promotion for their own movie Grindhouse, which opened at the festival's midpoint. (Tarantino even screened it at the New Beverly a couple of days in advance of its national release as a treat for the faithful.)

The Grindhouse 2007 was a wonderful gathering of like-minded cineastes and trash fans, and though no one could have possibly anticipated it, the festival also served as a going-away celebration for two of its premier participants. Director John Flynn, who was present at a screening and absorbed the audience appreciation for his well-regarded thriller Rolling Thunder (1977), passed away a mere two weeks later. His appearance at the New Beverly would be his last in public, and shortly after the New Beverly paid tribute to Flynn by screening his underrated mob picture The Outfit (1974)-- and if memory serves, Rolling Thunder was on the bill that night too.* (* UPDATE 4/6/08 My memory apparently does not serve me well after all. Brian wrote me an e-mail this weekend reminding me that the John Flynn double bill that appeared at the New Beverly shortly after the director's death was in fact the director's follow-up to Rolling Thunder, Jan-Michael Vincent and Teresa Saldana in Defiance (1980) doubled with one of the few good Steven Seagal movies, Out for Justice (1991). I get the feeling, though, that if they received enough e-mails requesting to see Flynn at his best, the New Beverly might just be open to a Rolling Thunder/The Outfit double bill sometime soon. Let's get those cards and letters, as they used to say, coming in!)

But even more to the heart of the matter, it was only after basking in the success of his theater’s highest–profile event in years that on July 18 we were all informed of the tragic death of Sherman Torgan, the man who owned the New Beverly. Torgan shepherded the theater through several rough and economically unsure decades, which included the demise of campus film societies, the Beta-VHS wars, the rise of VHS and the home video revolution, and at the time of his death the encroaching competition of DVD and high-tech home theaters. An outpouring of support for the Torgan family, particularly for son Michael who decided to carry on in his father’s footsteps, coincided with an uptick in business for the New Beverly, which some lay at least partially at the feet of Tarantino’s festival, as well as the Times Square sensibilities of Caidin and Quinn, and now Phil Blankenship, who has spearheaded the Midnight Movie revival at the theater by canny programming of cult hits and ‘80s nostalgia fare.


Key to the New Beverly’s apparent renaissance have also been offshoots of the Tarantino-curated Grindhouse 2007 festival, in which directors such as Edgar Wright and Eli Roth have programmed a couple of weeks on the New Beverly calendar with some of their favorites. Both Wright’s selections (which included canny double bills like Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik paired with the 1980 Flash Gordon, and the mad tracking shots of Raising Arizona and Evil Dead 2) and Roth’s slates (Carrie plus co-hit Zapped!, et al) were a lot of fun, and featured plenty of great guest appearances by some of the key players involved in making the films.

And now the New Beverly has scored probably its greatest coup yet in terms of presenting filmmakers and the movies they love to eager audiences. This time they got a great filmmaker to hold court for two weeks, diagramming and dissecting his influences, his personal tastes and the idiosyncratic, cynical humor that is so much a part of what he brings to every movie he makes. Starting Saturday night with a midnight screening of the director’s 1978 Jaws rip-off/parody entitled Piranha, the New Beverly will give over two weeks to Joe Dante and his Dante’s Inferno film festival. Dante has long been one of my favorite directors, an unrepentant appreciator of the camp qualities and the genuine wit and scrappy creativity to be found among the many titles to have filled the B-movie bucket over the past 50 years or so. His encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly every movie ever released, his unimpeachable cinematic acumen, is never show-offy, either in his films or in the many interviews and DVD commentaries he has graced during his career. Nor is his command of film style and artistry. He is that rarity, a smart filmmaker with a degree of humility who allows his intelligence to shine through his work in ways that are often misinterpreted or devalued by the keepers of the cultural flame.


For this reason, not nearly so many people as should tend to understand that movies like Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Explorers, The ‘burbs and his HBO film The Second Civil War are masterpieces of design, effect, satire and social commentary that far outstrip most of the movies that august bodies tend to crown with awards. Dante's movies are firecrackers, ones you shouldn't hold in your hands for long. They snap, crackle, pop and outright supernova with the kind of exuberance that most directors half his age can’t muster. Don Mancini’s Seed of Chucky is about the only movie that can stand anywhere near Gremlins 2 as an acid-blooded, tear-the-roof-off-the-joint studio sequel that makes the very idea of a sequel its radically funny foundation, a foundation from which a virtual house of mirrors explodes and plasters the walls of the cinema with a thousand different angles on creative cannibalism.

The audience gets another funhouse mirror held up to itself in The ‘burbs, as critical a movie of its own viewers and their uglier tendencies as I’ve ever seen (which perhaps explain why, despite its high laugh count, audiences much preferred seeing this movie on cable TV and DVD as opposed to a theater, where their surroundings weren’t so instantly comforting).


Many hold up Dante’s original Gremlins as the movie that spears the Spielbergian sensibility most effectively—it was a movie that Dante made for Spielberg’s Amblin’ Entertainment, after all. I think there’s no denying that Dante finds the sour satire at the gooey heart of Chris Columbus’ script (now, there’s a filmmaker after Spielberg’s fresh, still-beating heart). But speaking of hearts, Dante’s doesn’t seem to be fully engaged in dissecting the Spielberg universe-- Gremlins was a job for hire, and he had fun squeezing as much juice out of the concept as possible. For me, Explorers instead represents Dante’s most personal work, one in which the optimism of the Spielberg framework is exercised and ultimately put to one of the best anti-climactic jokes ever pulled in a major motion picture. And again, it’s a joke that comes as much at the expense of the audience, who are ready to lap up lots more Spielbergian scraps until Dante’s jolts them out of their potentially euphoric experience, as it does to Spielberg himself who, with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, had already begun to leave the E.T. superstructure behind. It was left to Dante to tweak, make resonate with extra feeling, and put to use as a brilliant coming-of-age tale that doesn’t feel the slightest bit sentimental. Explorers is currently a favorite of my own daughters, and I’m very thankful for that.

Finally, the welcome bruises one takes while watching Dante’s bleakly hilarious The Second Civil War are well earned. The large-scale canvas Dante paints on (ironically, on the small screen) is full of cacophonous life—Beau Bridges is an Idaho senator who secedes from the nation rather than allow passage of a group of Afghani refugees through his state. The tailspin this rash and politically cynical decision sets in motion finally engulfs the entire country. The movie gains in blackly comic ground, and in deeper, darker shadows, as it reaches for its inevitable conclusion. Dante juggles a pessimistic vision of media, politics and abdicated responsibilities of citizenry with deft visual sleight of hand—- the movie never seems sluggish or weighed down with purpose, but instead light on its feet, skipping like a bug over boiling lava, heading for disaster. To think of another movie I felt handled this kind of subject matter this well, a brooding, brutally funny tapestry of head-spinning, pop-eyed Americana, I might just have to invoke the “N” word-- Network, or perhaps Nashville.

Unfortunately, for patrons ready to spend some time with Dante discussing his own films, three of the four Dante films fall under the purview of Blankenship's midnight hour-- Piranha screens Saturday night, April 5, Gremlins 2: The New Batch shows up April 12 at midnight, and April 26 brings The Howling to the New Beverly at the witching (or the wolfing) hour. (Dante has apparently not discounted the possibility of showing up for at least one of these.) But the sole Dante film to make it onto the regular schedule (at least as it stands right now) is a doozy and one of my favorite movies of all time: Hollywood Boulevard (1976), which really should be seen at a drive-in, but that’s no excuse to pass up this opportunity. It’ll screen April 11 and 12 along with Isaac Hayes in Truck Turner (1974), directed by another of Dante’s classmates at the Roger Corman School of Exploitation Filmmaking, Jonathan Kaplan, who will be attendance for at least one of the nights.


Otherwise, the schedule is an excellent tribute to the genres and influences that Dante feels have made him the filmmaker (and film lover) he is today.



On April 9 and 10, a fascinating double bill—the trashy shock “documentary” Mondo Cane (1962) paired with the grim and glorious spectacle of doomed Imperialism, Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins and Michael Caine in Cy Endfield’s excellent Zulu (1964).



April 11-12 bring Hollywood Boulevard and Truck Turner to the screen in a virtual time-travel capsule back to the glorious days of ‘70s exploitation cinema.


April 13-15 looks to be a real treat. Arch Hall Jr. stars as The Sadist (1963), a relentless low-budget shocker about a group of innocent kids trapped in a junkyard by the titular creep and his equally creepy girlfriend. I caught the last half hour of this on TCM not too long ago and found it riveting; it was shot by none other than Vilmos Zsigmond, who will be in attendance at least one of the nights. The bill will be more than filled by Larry Cohen’s delirious political thriller The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977) starring Broderick Crawford, who heads a unbelievable cast including Rip Torn, Michael Parks, Jose Ferrer, Celeste Holm, John Marley, Ronee Blakely and Andrew Duggan.



April 16-17 brings Roger Corman’s The Secret Invasion (1964) to the New Beverly, plus genuinely awesome co-hit, Corman’s Tomb of Ligeia (1964), written by Robert Towne.


Richard Brooks’ Wrong is Right (1982), a prescient satire of TV news blather and nuclear destruction that has, like Network, been outstripped of its outrageous satire by reality itself in the form of Fox News and just about every outsized, greedy political figure on the scene, heads the bill on April 18-19. It will be twinned up with a mystery movie, the title of which is not yet known or being revealed. It has been suggested that it will be in a similar apocalyptically satirical vein.



April 20-21 shows Dante’s taste for terror remains unabated and as sophisticated as ever. Piers Haggard’s gorgeous and insinuating Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), which I was lucky enough to see last summer on the big screen, is already unmissable. But then team it with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas riding the Horror Express (1973) and you’ve got a grade-A ‘70s horror coupling that will satisfy even the most jaded fanatic.

Finally, Dante’s Inferno finishes off with a big bang, the often-discussed but rarely seen short version (at 4 hours, 20 minutes!) of Joe Dante and Jon Davison’s wild collage of trailers, clips and anti-military documentary clips (plus a whole lot more) entitled The Movie Orgy (1968). Incredibly, a much longer seven-hour version was quite a sensation, traveling from screening to screening in Dante’s college days. Here the director is bringing out the much more digestible-in-one-sitting short version to end his days with the New Beverly. That sounds like a rare treat indeed, and I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

More details on these movies and other things Joe Dante has on his mind coming up later today, so keep your eye on this space for a major update. But right now, get to your calendars, start marking your dates and make sure to make plans to arrive at the New Beverly early. Get more updates on the festival by checking in directly with the New Beverly Cinema.