One Day Only!
Admission is Free!
Saturday, February 4th at 12noon
Joe Dante’s
THE MOVIE ORGY
A send-up and a celebration of mid-century American
kitsch, Joe Dante’s epic pop culture mash-up, The Movie
Orgy, entertained college campuses through the late 1960s and 1970s,
drawing upon an ever-changing library of ’50s drive-in movies, vintage
commercials, TV westerns, and political speeches. Re-discovered and re-cut by
Dante into its 280 minute “Ultimate Version,” this legendary cinematic event
now comes to the Cinema Arts Centre! SEE a colossal collage of nostalgia! SEE
an experience of mind-rotting celluloid hysteria! SEE thousands of performers
in roles that earned them obscurity! SEE bosomy starlets, juvenile
delinquency, Christian puppetry, Elvis Presley, Groucho
Marx, and Richard Nixon!
Few films (or “film experiences”) have evolved over time as
much as Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy, a comically massive and
massively comic super-cut of Cold War Americana culled from B-features, movie
serials, and television. Starting as a lark assembled and performed by Dante,
then a student at the Philadelphia College of Art and a contributing editor to
the magazine Castle of Frankenstein, and Jon Davison, a
16mm film collector still in high school (and a long way from becoming the
producer of Airplane! and Robocop), The
Movie Orgy played on college campuses for less than a decade and
then vanished. In the years after, the five to seven-hour screening became a
cinematic legend that only a select few could rightfully claim to have
witnessed. Yet, like all great movie monsters, The Movie Orgy has
risen from its tomb. Dante’s nearly 5-hour long, digitally preserved “Ultimate
Version” has returned for audiences ready to embrace the “lost opus” of a
favorite filmmaker.
Reconsidering The Movie Orgy, it’s easy
to read its history as a reflection on the cinematic life of Joe Dante (Gremlins, Gremlins
2: The Next Batch, The Howling, Piranha, Small
Soldiers, Matinee, Innerspace, The ‘Burbs, Hollywood
Boulevard, Runaway Daughters) himself, from young artist to
elder statesman. Thankfully, the stories of Dante and his epic found footage
epic are long and fascinating ones.
(USA, 1968, 222 min., color & b/w, DCP /
Director: Joe Dante / Producer: Jon Davison /
Cast: Ann-Margaret, The Beatles, Ngo Dinh Diem, Dwight D.
Eisenhower, Ralph Richardson, Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Groucho Marx,
Edward R Murrow, Bela Lugosi, Jack Nicholson, Phyllis Diller, Walter Cronkite,
Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Dave Garroway, Gordon Scott, Walter Brennan,
Howard K. Smith, Howdy Doody, Robert Vaughn, and many more!)
