In the age of instant gratification, when giant chunks of a studio’s back catalog of classic and not-so-classic films are available at the click of a queue button, once-in-a-lifetime experiences are a pretty rare commodity. But those in attendance Tuesday night at the New Beverly Cinema here in Los Angeles witnessed one, the real deal, to close out
Dante’s Inferno, the two-week film festival hosted by director and raconteur extraordinaire Joe Dante. Dante delighted audiences throughout the series with picks from an eclectic roster of personal favorites (some of the prints shown were his), each introduced by the director with his typical self-deprecating humor and displays of his seemingly boundless, encyclopedic knowledge of film. But on Tuesday Dante brought out a real treasure to share with the faithful— the long-whispered-about but rarely seen
Movie Orgy, a four and a half-hour-long melting pot of movie and TV clips pureed and reconstructed around the narrative spines of such trash classics as
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, Beginning of the End, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the teen rebel cheapie
Speed Crazy starring Brett Halsey. (This “short” version—the original ran over seven hours—is actually billed on-screen as
Son of Movie Orgy Rides Again; its origins, and much, much more, are discussed
here.)
The Movie Orgy isn’t really a movie. It’s more like a hallucinatory party for the certifiably movie mad. What began in 1968 as a lark instigated by two creative movie fans (Dante and his close friend, future producer Jon Davison) soon became an event, an explosion of movie geek love that morphed into a small cult phenomenon-- the one existing print toured college campuses in the dark shadows of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War before being retired in the early ‘70s. Dante says before transferring it to DVD just before last Tuesday’s screening that he hadn’t seen it himself in nearly 30 years. And for years those who remember seeing it back in the day would recount their experiences with it to fans of Dante’s work who could only imagine the anarchic sensibility of the
Orgy, the best evidence of it being the myriad ways it seemed to have informed Dante’s subsequent movies and his identity as a director.
Tuesday night Joe Dante’s fans began lining up at the box office at 5:30 p.m. for their own chance to see what the
Orgy was all about. I was joined by my friend
Aaron, who came all the way from Winnipeg for Dante’s Inferno. We were in the sixth and seventh spots in line and spent a half hour or so commiserating with actor
Clu Gulager, a self-confessed film geek and a regular at the New Beverly, who was right behind us in the number-eight slot. (Also spotted in the crowd—Allan Arkush, Jon Davison, Bill Hader—one half of the police presence in
Superbad-- Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino.)
When show time finally arrived, Dante seemed to relish his introduction; clearly he was curious to see what an audience 40 years removed from the one for which
The Movie Orgy and its chaotic pastiche of ‘50s and ‘60s movie, TV, advertising and educational film references was intended, would make of the film. He reemphasized that it was always intended as a movie to be walked out on, and even went so far as to encourage everyone to get up and move about during the screening, take a pee, go outside, have a smoke, grab a pizza and come back at our leisure. This was a movie made for inebriation of all sorts, he suggested, before a last-minute warning about the general tastelessness and silliness we were about to witness. But this audience was already inebriated with anticipation and movie love—if Joe Dante was worried about how
The Movie Orgy would play after all these years, he needn’t have been. In addition to being as spasmodically, recklessly entertaining as any four and a half-hour-long movie marathon I’ve ever seen (hmm, have I seen any others?),
The Movie Orgy was remarkable as an opportunity to peek inside the brain of a brilliant movie director and see the nascent manifestation of a comic sensibility, political worldview and all-encompassing passion for low-fi moving images all rolled up and twisted together in an untamed package that can be directly correlated to the films he would spend the next 40 years bringing to life.
In
The Movie Orgy, Dante and Davison boldly and proudly mash up the sophisticated and the sophomoric. Their slice-and-dice aesthetic is hardly random though; the narrative lines of those sci-fi movies that provide what there is of the
Orgy's spine are routinely violated by the intercutting of TV commercials, patches of industrial and sex education films and political speeches (1968 being the point of origin here, Nixon gets kicked around plenty). Each time the movie lurches back into the “story” of whatever film is being revisited, the surrounding footage more often than not subtly, and sometimes not-so-subtly, provides deranged commentary on what preceded it. (One clip, from a children’s show hosted by Andy Devine, has the potential in sheer creeping weirdness to drop even the most jaded viewer’s jaw to the floor—it involves tying live animals, a cat and a squirrel, to tiny musical instruments and forcing them to perform while the endearingly off-kilter host giddily looks on.)
What’s particularly exciting about
The Movie Orgy is seeing Dante and Davison discover the comic and satiric possibilities of editing, juxtaposing found footage that draws out inferences and perspectives about the material, and about the burning world outside, that must have been heady and cathartic for the student audiences of the time who gobbled it up. Butted up against clips of Nixon, old footage exposing the casual racism of the time, and a genuinely weird Bufferin ad campaign which crops up throughout the program (in one of several varying scenarios, a caring, put-upon college dean frets about campus unrest, then pops a Bufferin to ease his pain-- “Strong medicine for sensitive people”), one starts to get a time-capsule picture of a world in chaos that might be unexpected if one was anticipating merely a hodgepodge of straight nostalgia for baby-boomers. (In his introduction, Dante pointedly drew parallels between that time and this—unpopular president, unpopular war, crumbling economy—before noting that the difference after 40 years is the absence of the draft, which added fuel to the fires of a generation’s distrust of establishment authority.)
But
The Movie Orgy also finds Dante and Davison playing with the possibilities of editing in ways that presage their duties as the trailer cutting department for New World Pictures several years later. One bit finds what was originally a long take of a man trying to stuff a tennis racket into a suitcase shattered into fragments, extended and hilariously sandwiched between various clips over a half hour of running time. Each new piece builds upon the knowledge of the previous piece, the harsh cutaways adding an edge of absurdity to a bit of comedy that was droll at best in its original form. Entire episodes of TV shows like
The Return of Rusty and
Tales of the Texas Rangers are presented with full credits and lead-in sponsored commercials, only to have the body to the show reduced to a quick spasm of action—Rusty literally returning, a fistfight between Ranger and roughneck—before rolling straight into the end credits. And in the
Orgy’s most transcendently riotous joke, whenever the
Orgy returns its deficit attention to
Speed Crazy, it’s to feature Halsey repeating a variation on his character’s sullen mantra, “Don’t crowd me, man,” which he apparently does at least 20 times. (The line was later directly referenced by teen rebel Paul Rudd in Dante’s terrific remake of
Runaway Daughters.)
It’s worth noting again that the print we saw Tuesday night is the only print in existence of the
Orgy. It traveled all around the country in various states of disrepair, patched together with glue and prayer, and was physically assembled, as it was often reassembled, by splicing tape with no visual reference point such as a Moviola screen. Just to contemplate this reality, in an age when any joe (lower-case) with a computer, or even an AVID editing system, could easily produce a similar, much slicker bombardment of images, is to understand the movie love and intelligence behind this anything-but-slick project. And this understanding adds a bittersweet edge to the experience too—every time I found myself thinking about how I couldn’t wait to see a bit, or the entirety of
The Movie Orgy again, I had to remind myself that I probably never will.
The
Orgy itself, building on the framework provided by
Speed Crazy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and those other titles, accelerates to a frenzy of chases and explosions, giant monster attacks and giant monster deaths, with an all-too-appropriate multiple orgasm of “The End” cards and a trail of Academy leader signifying the satisfying close to this by now close-to-hallucinatory experience. I have never seen a packed New Beverly crowd erupt into a standing ovation before last Tuesday night. I suspect if Dante and the New Beverly put together a Dante’s Inferno II, which is reportedly more than just a rumor, that it will not be the last. (Diablo Cody is up next with a festival of her favorites in July.)
One of the most heartening things to see emerge from the shadow of owner Sherman Torgan’s death last summer, and the series of genre and director-oriented screenings and festivals that have highlighted the New Beverly Cinema’s schedule over the last year, is how much of a true film community has gathered around the theater, turning the New Beverly itself into a bit of a cult phenomenon. Since making the theater a more than semi-regular habit over the past year, I’ve started to notice and recognize many familiar faces who undoubtedly attend screenings far more regularly than I, and it was my singular pleasure Tuesday to finally meet Sherman’s son Michael, who is doing such a fine job carrying on his father’s revival theater legacy. Especially for an event like
The Movie Orgy, but even during the regular calendar, there’s a true, burgeoning sense of community and even camaraderie present here, a sense of shared experience and desire to see great, unusual, rare movies, but also to see the New Beverly survive. Programs like Dante’s Inferno, and people like the enthusiastic throng that greeted
The Movie Orgy Tuesday night, feed this experience and strengthen the prospects for this now-unique enterprise surviving, even as the general experience of collective movie-watching yields to the isolated consumption of movies in the home theater environment. For those who feel the love, the New Beverly Cinema is a nightly movie orgy, one for which I wish long life and continued good prints.
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The double feature, a tribute to the science fiction offerings in waning days of MGM in the ‘70s, that originally featured Logan’s Run, survives thematically, however. You can see Westworld (1973) and Soylent Green (1973) at the New Beverly tonight and tip your hat not only to the visions of the future that managed to squeak through the studio at a time when executive James T. Aubrey, Jr. was slashing budgets and alienating talent, but also to the memory of the recently deceased Charlton Heston, and to Sherman Torgan as well. And I have it on good authority that my friend Haruka Sometani-Straight, a pure-at-heart, card-carrying member of the New Beverly faithful, will be providing freshly baked Soylent Green cookies free of charge to those who attend tonight’s screening. Those of you who have seen Soylent Green may rest assured that Haruka has not varied one iota from the original recipe provided by the visionary urban planners whose template for population control proved so effective in the movie. And they’re delicious too! My tummy’s already grumblin’. See you tonight at the New Beverly, Haruka!
Well, it seems now that, if he hasn’t completed his journey, then he’s made it around the block. In a lengthy transcript of a podcast conversation with Keith Uhlich, Matt has revealed that he will be leaving the world of print (and Internet) film criticism, after 17 years, in order to pursue full-time his talents and inspirations as a filmmaker. (Keith will assume House-keeping duties as the overseeing editor.) Those who have seen Matt’s first feature,Home, already know that this announcement hardly heralds a shot in the dark. The movie pulsates with keen observations about human behavior and a convivial atmosphere both in subject—a house party where connections are made remade, and broken—and spirit of filmmaking. He shows a remarkable fluency and agility with narrative conventions in Home that often conjures up the benevolent spirit of Robert Altman. As David Hudson has already noted, it’s clear that Matt is not making this decision lightly and has considered the implications from A to Z. From a purely selfish perspective, I have ambivalent feelings about Matt’s announcement-- it’s going to be weird not having his writing to refer to on a regular basis, at the House and in The New York Times. On the other hand, as someone who loves the art of film, as we all do, it’s hard not to be excited at the prospect of witnessing a genuinely intelligent voice move into producing and directing movies. For all of us who complain loudly about the dumbing-down of American movies, indies as well as Hollywood blockbusters, this is definitely one for the good guys. 
The Movie Orgy isn’t really a movie. It’s more like a hallucinatory party for the certifiably movie mad. What began in 1968 as a lark instigated by two creative movie fans (Dante and his close friend, future producer Jon Davison) soon became an event, an explosion of movie geek love that morphed into a small cult phenomenon-- the one existing print toured college campuses in the dark shadows of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War before being retired in the early ‘70s. Dante says before transferring it to DVD just before last Tuesday’s screening that he hadn’t seen it himself in nearly 30 years. And for years those who remember seeing it back in the day would recount their experiences with it to fans of Dante’s work who could only imagine the anarchic sensibility of the Orgy, the best evidence of it being the myriad ways it seemed to have informed Dante’s subsequent movies and his identity as a director.
Tuesday night Joe Dante’s fans began lining up at the box office at 5:30 p.m. for their own chance to see what the Orgy was all about. I was joined by my friend Aaron, who came all the way from Winnipeg for Dante’s Inferno. We were in the sixth and seventh spots in line and spent a half hour or so commiserating with actor Clu Gulager, a self-confessed film geek and a regular at the New Beverly, who was right behind us in the number-eight slot. (Also spotted in the crowd—Allan Arkush, Jon Davison, Bill Hader—one half of the police presence in Superbad-- Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino.) 
What’s particularly exciting about The Movie Orgy is seeing Dante and Davison discover the comic and satiric possibilities of editing, juxtaposing found footage that draws out inferences and perspectives about the material, and about the burning world outside, that must have been heady and cathartic for the student audiences of the time who gobbled it up. Butted up against clips of Nixon, old footage exposing the casual racism of the time, and a genuinely weird Bufferin ad campaign which crops up throughout the program (in one of several varying scenarios, a caring, put-upon college dean frets about campus unrest, then pops a Bufferin to ease his pain-- “Strong medicine for sensitive people”), one starts to get a time-capsule picture of a world in chaos that might be unexpected if one was anticipating merely a hodgepodge of straight nostalgia for baby-boomers. (In his introduction, Dante pointedly drew parallels between that time and this—unpopular president, unpopular war, crumbling economy—before noting that the difference after 40 years is the absence of the draft, which added fuel to the fires of a generation’s distrust of establishment authority.)
But The Movie Orgy also finds Dante and Davison playing with the possibilities of editing in ways that presage their duties as the trailer cutting department for New World Pictures several years later. One bit finds what was originally a long take of a man trying to stuff a tennis racket into a suitcase shattered into fragments, extended and hilariously sandwiched between various clips over a half hour of running time. Each new piece builds upon the knowledge of the previous piece, the harsh cutaways adding an edge of absurdity to a bit of comedy that was droll at best in its original form. Entire episodes of TV shows like The Return of Rusty and Tales of the Texas Rangers are presented with full credits and lead-in sponsored commercials, only to have the body to the show reduced to a quick spasm of action—Rusty literally returning, a fistfight between Ranger and roughneck—before rolling straight into the end credits. And in the Orgy’s most transcendently riotous joke, whenever the Orgy returns its deficit attention to Speed Crazy, it’s to feature Halsey repeating a variation on his character’s sullen mantra, “Don’t crowd me, man,” which he apparently does at least 20 times. (The line was later directly referenced by teen rebel Paul Rudd in Dante’s terrific remake of Runaway Daughters.)
The Orgy itself, building on the framework provided by Speed Crazy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and those other titles, accelerates to a frenzy of chases and explosions, giant monster attacks and giant monster deaths, with an all-too-appropriate multiple orgasm of “The End” cards and a trail of Academy leader signifying the satisfying close to this by now close-to-hallucinatory experience. I have never seen a packed New Beverly crowd erupt into a standing ovation before last Tuesday night. I suspect if Dante and the New Beverly put together a Dante’s Inferno II, which is reportedly more than just a rumor, that it will not be the last. (Diablo Cody is up next with a festival of her favorites in July.)
