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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My colleagues at Facets Multi-Media and I are gearing up for another session of Night School, our truly unique and downright odd midnight movie series that is unlike any other alternative film series in the city. The next session starts this coming Saturday, February 6, at midnight and runs through March 27.

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Let’s see if I can describe the disquieting effect of The Unfinished Dance adequately for those who haven’t been exposed to it. The formula for The Unfinished Dance (1947-Henry Koster), a rarely seen film that will be aired at 1:15pm on January 15th, is a heady brew, composed of mysterious elements blended from this: