Back during the ’60s in the US and Europe, you might have walked into a bar and come face to face with a video jukebox. The most well-known of these brands was the Scopitone. Just as a standard jukebox is loaded with records of current hits, these video jukeboxes were loaded with 16mm (or 8mm) film loops specially created for the machines. These were often lip-synch clips, though sometimes there were more adventurous scenarios – and almost always a lot of sex appeal.
Scopitone’s main stateside competitor was the Color-Sonic unit, whose clips were created by the non-theatrical Hollywood distributor Official Films. The films contracted by Official are many of the best of the proto-music video clips we now generically call Scopitones.
Robert Altman was a jobbing director at the time, making TV shows and picking up gigs where possible. He made a few Color-Sonic shorts and – while we won’t put them with his best work – they’re pretty interesting.
These 16mm and 8mm films have never been preserved so the extant (highly faded) versions are all we have to judge them by. They are further degraded by bad transfers and compression, but check them out and you’ll get an idea of what Robert Altman’s world looked like in 1966.
This one is fairly typical of a Scopitone-type scenario. The (alarmingly sedate-sounding) actor/singer Bobby Troupe is surrounded by women eager to model outfits for him.
Here the legendary stripper Lili St. Cyr (aged 48 or so) rolls around in diaphanous clothes in a tent on the beach at Big Sur while a guitar-heavy version of “Ebb Tide” plays.
This is the cleverest one. It’s a whole party scenario set to Herb Alpert’s “Bittersweet Samba.” Hopefully a better quality version of this can be found. It’s very funny and very Altman.
In 1955, the BBC invited Orson Welles to create a series of 15 minute monologues for broadcast. He is a fascinating speaker, of course, and his life experience, even at the relatively tender age of 40, was prodigious. The format of the series is very basic, Welles shows sketches he has made over the years and talks about the subjects of the pictures, with many fascinating detours.
Here he is, talking about cue cards, Houdini, how all women hate magic tricks, and telling John Barrymore stories:
Hopefully everyone knows about Welles’ famous WAR OF THE WORLDS radio broadcast, which was staged as a series of news reports and which caused a huge panic as people believed an alien invasion was occurring. Here’s Welles’ (very funny) side of the story, with another appearance by John Barrymore, who literally released the hounds when he heard the broadcast:
Here he tells a very funny story about being detained by the police abroad and offers opinions about the police and their role – and the limits of that role – that could practically be ripped from today’s editorial pages. “The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman than the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal.”
Here he actually uses this sentence: “The only other member of the coven who had any English was a dwarf with gold teeth by the name of Jazzbo.” He also tells of a disastrous performance of HENRY V, in which his archers accidentally fired into the audience, scoring a direct hit on a feared critic. He also talks about his legendary all-black cast production of MACBETH, and the death (by magic?) of a racially intolerant critic:
It’s a story with something of the complexity (and wit) of a Zen koan. Listen to Steven Spielberg recount his childhood meeting with his lifelong hero John Ford. It’s one of the best stories of any kind you’ll ever hear, and if you love Ford, you’ll cherish this story. It’s a moment of tremendous film-historical import. Ever since, Spielberg has watched a Ford film (or two) before starting a film of his own.
Ever since I first heard this story, I have thought about Ford’s “Where’s the horizon!?” anytime I’ve watched a Ford film – or a Spielberg film – or anybody’s film.
“All of a sudden a man comes into the office, dressed like a big game hunter. Like, safari clothes. Floppy hat. He had a patch over his eye. He was chewing on a handkerchief and he had a cigar in his other hand. And he had lipstick kisses all over his face, but the kind that are put there for fun, you know. Not smears but complete shapes of lips on his forehead, his cheeks, one on his nose. And he goes into his office without saying a word to his secretary. She grabs a box of Kleenex and she runs after him.”
Later:
“When you can come to the conclusion that putting the horizon on the bottom of the frame or the top of the frame is a lot better than putting the horizon in the middle of the frame, then you may someday make a good picture-maker. Now get out of here!”
Dame Diana Rigg is a great actress who has been thrilling audiences for a long time, from her beginnings on the stage through her run on the silly but fun AVENGERS TV series and on through her many excellent performances and now on GAME OF THRONES. In THE AVENGERS she played no-nonsense genius secret agent Emma Peel who was also an unstoppable judo-flipping machine when the chips were down. It made a pretty strong impression at the time and after she hung up the elastic jumpsuit for the last time a lot of people were sad about it.
That may account for these mysterious films, which appear to have been shot on small gauge film by an amateur or semi-pro unit. The two movies, MINIKILLERS, and the stylistically similar THE DIADEM, were sold on 8mm film. These are mysterious items indeed. They show Rigg going about some very Emma Peel-style maneuvers in beautiful locales. and in a variety of outfits.
There has been some speculation that these films were shot for Emma Peel fetishists (and according to Psychotronic’s Michael Weldon, Avengers episodes were sold in bondage boutiques on Times Square), that may explain it, but these are pretty tame films and I would expect more overt content if that were the case. Maybe the most surprising part is that a noted, big-deal star did these cheap 8mm films. Whatever the explanation, they are a lot of fun. They are a bit like moving fashion-shoots, with plot logic that borders on the abstract. And of course they star the beautiful Miss Rigg, which is good enough to make them watchable despite their quality.
Here’s a short version of DIADEM. It is cut but in color and not-awful quality, which is good:
Here it is, longer but in black and white:
Here’s the other one, MINIKILLERS, in the worst quality of anything ever on earth:
Last month, filmmaker Todd Rohal shared the impossible-to-mentally-or-spiritually-digest short SMASHIN’ IT UP with us. As soon as we were out of traction and were peering cautiously out the front door, Rohal threw this at us – another masterpiece of “I no know” called MOTHER & SON, made by Matthew Silver.
Here’s Todd Rohal to introduce:
If you have been to New York City recently, chances are you’ve seen Matthew Silver performing in a subway station or around Union Square Park. He wears a Speedo and preaches about love. After nearly a decade of enduring jeers from the public, he’s just recently been embraced by NYC residents. He’s been featured on greeting cards and TV shows and is now a fixture of New York street performance. He is a truly inspired madman and his brain is wired unlike any person or device yet invented. Matthew made this film, MOTHER AND SON when he was still in high school. It’s a massive achievement in editing and consumer-grade videography and a true vision of a nightmarish world that I hope to never personally experience. It is based on true events from the lives of the film’s stars, Uncle Andy and Grandma Ping. Here it is, divided into 4 separate YouTube clips, for reasons we won’t bother to explain:
The Texas Archive Of The Moving Image was founded in 2002 by the University Of Texas Professor Dr. Caroline Frick with the intention of preserving, archive and educate the public about Texas film. TAMI has rescued hundreds of hours of film from basements, school warehouses & elsewhere.
Along the way they have uncovered some special treasures.
This horror movie was made in Hays County, Texas by Austin’s Ramon Galindo (pictured above), using Austin residents as his cast and crew. It has a charm and innocence all its own. Films like this get better with age. Enjoy.
To those of you who are fortunate enough to be in Austin on Monday December 8, don’t miss the free-for-all History Of Television show. We do these every other month and this month we pay a long overdue tribute to a man who, pretty much more than anybody else, created the sitcom as we know it. His enormously popular radio show was succeeded in the ’50s by a television version that kept the looseness, geniality, intimacy and good humor of the radio show. Jack Benny was a comic catalyst who gave his collaborators most of the good lines and managed to to wonders with a look or a small gesture.
We will be joined by UT Professor Kathryn Fuller-Seely, who is writing what we hope will be the definitive book about Jack Benny for introductions and information about Benny, his times & his legacy.
Here are a couple of clips of Benny in his element with famous guest stars.
Jack Davis’ caricature style is instantly recognizable. He has been a highly prolific illustrator for most of his 90 years. He has done EC horror comics, Mad Magazine, many magazine covers and also some pretty significant movie posters. Enjoy this small gallery of some of Jack Davis’ poster work.
Maya Deren was an experimental filmmaker probably best known for her dreamlike first film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON and the unforgettable documentary DIVINE HORSEMEN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI.
Here are the shots taken for an unfinished film called WITCH’S CRADLE (1943). The silence, repetition of takes, and slates between shots add an element of strangeness to a film that is already plenty eerie and weird. As with so many experimental films of the time, it seems to be from a much later era. If you saw these same images shot on a camcorder with Cabaret Voltaire music underneath, you could easily believe it was from 1983 instead. The man here is played by Marcel Duchamp, by the way. Enjoy.
I saw my first A/V Geeks show in the rec room of a Durham church in 1992 or so. Skip Elsheimer had two projectors and was overlaying the two images on one screen as I recall. It was an interesting experiment and Skip was even more interesting to talk to. It turned out that the 16mm projectors and films he was using were being discarded by school systems as obsolete now that VCRs had come to stay.
He kept at this for years, decades even, and by now Skip has rescued many, many of those films, not only from school systems but from other state agencies, basements, private collectors – pretty much anyplace where they could be found. Had it not been for Skip, a lot of these films, which were generally produced in tiny runs, would have been lost forever, consigned to dumpsters throughout the country.
Nowadays that collection is enormous, over 24,000 films strong. But this isn’t just a hoard of films, it’s a resource. Skip is also a terrific programmer and his packages of short films, which he introduces in his own sly, funny way, are tremendously educational and entertaining. His film packages play to libraries full of school kids as well as rock nightclubs full of tattooed degenerate scum. He also manages to maintain a profitable line in stock footage – and good for him. Here’s a short doc about Skip’s operation.
1. BLUES MAKER – a short educational film that shows the beyond-legendary guitarist/singer Mississippi Fred McDowell in his element. McDowell plays, sings, talks about his music and there are shots of the Mississippi cotton country near his home.
2. BAD DOG – A short comic film from the POV of a disobedient dog as his owner takes him for a walk through the park. I’m on the dog’s side all the way. The music is crazy ’70s breakbeat synthi-jazz and the actor is the familiar Paul Benedict.
3. THE STORY – This short features young Matt Groening and his younger sisters Lisa and little Maggie. It was made by their father Homer, who does not seem like a dolt at all. Matt tells the story of some zoo animals. It’s very sweet.
4. A CAR IS BORN – Very ’70s “assembly-line porn” showing the construction of a car in an auto-production plant. Some of the music cues and the NFL Films style narration clue you in that this is very, very serious stuff.
5. CALCIUM – As it turns out, calcium is important for your health. Who knew? Here’s a little film that extols the virtues of calcium in the most ’80s way imaginable. I do want that pizza-slice costume if anybody finds it.
Austin Chronicle editor (and AFS founding board member) Louis Black contributed a pretty special Selected Short a few weeks back, so we asked him for another and he obliged with this jaunty little number. Here’s Louis: This 1935 commercial for Borden’s Milk is the only really interesting film I’ve ever seen from Van Beuren Animation Studios but it is a keeper. I see it as a conflict between Anglo Saxons and Eastern European Jews but suspect that is a minority opinion. It is about sadness and happiness with milk making all the difference.
