A friend recently brought my attention to a Craigslist posting for some 16mm films that were being sold by a private collector in Denver who was offering a 16mm Kodak Pageant 2505 projector, take-up reels, plus a collection of vintage 16mm shorts. Titles listed included: Grand Hotel, Matinee, The Plumber, and Krazy Kat. It seemed like a screaming deal, so I instructed my assistant to make the purchase for the Film Studies Program and then anxiously awaited their delivery to screen some of these shorts as part of my backyard cinema series. I did, and I’m lucky my neighbors didn’t call the police. The Krazy Kat short was actually titled Krazy Kat House, and while it did hearken back to the silent-era, the only thing animated about this was the sexual libidos of the lesbians engaging in various graphic and explicit acts. Grand Hotel? This was no excerpt of the John Barrymore classic but rather the sexcapades of four people in a hotel room. Although it was hard to tell, due to the angles and the way it was shot, I’m pretty sure it did not involve Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. These women, however, were certainly ready for their close-ups, but mainly in the gynecological sense. READ MORE

Tomorrow night TCM Underground will be airing the surprisingly surreal and smart blaxploitation comedy, DARKTOWN STRUTTERS (1975). I hesitate to tag DARKTOWN STRUTTERS with a simplistic label like “blaxploitation” because it’s really a cult movie that deserves a category of its own. The film manages to combine just about every popular movie genre imaginable including classic westerns and musicals, biker films and revenge fantasies as well as science fiction into one of most unusual movies to come out of Hollywood in the early ‘70s. It lampoons stereotypical images of black Americans that populated earlier films but it’s still extremely relevant today.

DARKTOWN STRUTTERS was directed by William Witney and stars the beautiful and statuesque Trina Parks. In the film Trina plays the tough leader of a female biker gang who’s forced to save her mother and other prominent individuals in the black community when they become the victims of a creepy fast-food mogul and his Klan-like crew. Trina Parks only appeared in a handful of films during the ‘70s but she has continued to act, dance and sing on stage in various Broadway and off-Broadway shows and has appeared in popular Vegas productions. She’s currently working on a new one-woman show but she took some time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions about her acting career, including her work in DARKTOWN STRUTTERS and the popular James Bond film DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.

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There were two messages:  ”Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola.”  Vicary boasted that, during the six-week test, sales of popcorn increased 57.5% and Coke 18.1%.

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The fifth session of Chicago’s best-loved midnight movies series began this past Saturday at Facets Multi-Media. Dubbed Night School, the series is intended to be educational as well as entertaining, because each film is introduced in a 20 to 30 minute lecture by a knowledgeable Facets employee who then leads a Q&A after the movie is over. Most cinephiles are more than willing to linger at 2:00am to join others in a lively, intelligent discussion, and the open atmosphere encourages the free flow of different viewpoints and ideas about the film. This summer, the midnight series will last ten weeks, and, of all the sessions of Night School, Session 5 is truly unique. Part of my job here at Facets is to help my colleague Phil Morehart coordinate Night School, and Phil is always thinking of ways to make the series entertaining and different from typical midnight movie programs. For this session, Phil has come up with something that no other midnight movie series has ever done—at least not in Chicago.

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I work in the marketing department at Facets Multi-Media in Chicago. Part of the Facets operation is a vast videotheque, or video rentals store, which features thousands of foreign, indie, documentary, and classic films for viewers seeking something beyond contemporary Hollywood fare. As such, we are besieged with announcements from all manner of straight-to-DVD production companies, who want us to buy their titles for our rentals service or to sell via our online catalogue. The sellsheets for these films boggle my mind on a regular basis, either because the films being touted are ridiculous, or because the sell copy to promote the films is so badly conceived and written. Leafing through these sellsheets sparks many unanswerable questions: Who makes these movies? Who writes the copy for the promotional material, and do they ever crack open a dictionary or grammar book? How many copies of their product do they think they can sell when they can’t even describe what it is about? I thought I would share a few examples so all of you could get an idea of what I am talking about. It would be easy to crack jokes at the expense of these titles and their promotion materials, but nothing I could say would be funnier than the titles and sellsheets themselves.

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Asking Elliot Lavine to talk about his favorite film noirs is a little like asking a parent of many different children to describe what he loves about his babies. If you are anywhere near San Francisco in the next few weeks, you may want to hightail it over to the newly remodeled Roxie Theater in the Mission district for a chance to admire some of his neglected favorites–Elliot‘s nearly forgotten, “cheap, lowdown and tawdry” stepchildren, consisting of 28 rarely screened B noirs from the Poverty Row Studios. These movies will be on display from Friday, May 14th through Thursday, May 27th in a program entitled I STILL Wake Up Dreaming: Noir is Dead! / Long Live Noir! A complete list of these movies is posted at the end of this blog with links to the Roxie for times and ticket information.  A few days ago, Elliot was kind enough to submit to a grilling from me about all things film noir…

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Long ago, in a class on modern art, a professor once explained to me the value of art deemed avant-garde, underground, or even offensive. One point stuck out and has stayed with me over the years: Art that pushes the edges of accepted aesthetics, tastes, and standards—and, sometimes breaks free of them—keeps that mode of art from becoming too safe, narrow, and confined.  The theory is that if a few artists push the boundaries far beyond the norms and conventions, then those artists that prefer the middle of the road work within a broader range, preventing the art form from becoming stale, repetitive, and hollow. Not only should there be artists who push the edges, but there should be outlets for the public to see, hear, or experience that art, even if they are appalled, bored, or offended by it. It expands culture by broadening the tastes and tolerance of the mainstream public.

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Last year, in part because of the celebrations surrounding the films of 1939, I had a chance to introduce Gone With the Wind to younger viewers in my family who had never seen the film. It’s not a favorite movie of mine, so I could understand their appalled reactions to the innate racism of the story that implied that a slave’s first loyalty was to the families that owned them, (even after the Civil War and emancipation). Seen at a glance in GWTW, maybe the antebellum South’s biggest problems may only seem to be uppity white trash like Victor Jory’s oily Jonas Wilkerson, or the need for rebellious girls like Scarlett to maintain their hypocritical poses in a rigid social structure, while secretly acting on their own half-understood impulses, and the upheaval caused by those damn Yankees. But look a bit closer and you can see the story of changing attitudes and a brave woman struggling to make her mark in a world that both rejected and accepted her.  I don’t mean Scarlett Katie O’Hara, either.

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