THE BAT 1930S MUSICAL REVUE: THE HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS

Joining the Asylum Street Spankers in BAT's 1930s Musical Revue: The Holy Model Rounders, represented here by footage from the 1970s.

And here's recent footage of Holy Modal Rounder Peter Stampfel performing at an Anthology Film Archive screening of the HMR documentary Bound to Lose.



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TVTV GOES TO THE SUPER BOWL AND TVTV LOOKS AT THE OSCARS

In the 1970s, TVTV made an irreverent Super Bowl documentary with Bill "Billy" Murray and Christopher "Chris" Guest and an irreverent Oscar documentary with Lily Tomlin. Anthology Film Archives will screen both at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, January 30, 2008.

Here's a sampling of TVTV Goes to the Super Bowl. It looks like it could've been inspired by Robert Altman. Featured are Phyllis George, Pat Summerall, and Johnny Unitas. You can see the whole thing online courtesy of MediaBurn; the image just isn't very big.



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PICKET TICKETS: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: THE ADAPTATION

The problem: It's Friday night. And, due to the strike dimming The Great White Way, you can't see the Broadway versions of the movies Hairspray, Legally Blonde, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And you so wanted to see a version of a movie!

The solution: It's child's play. Literally. Because tonight, Anthology Film Archives screens the almost shot-by-shot remake Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation...videotaped and performed by teenagers...mostly in Mississippi...on Betamax...over the course of several years...during the 1980s!

Like some kind of rare archelogical artifact, the tape was more or less forgotten for more than a decade. Then, soon after the turn of the century, its time finally came in the form of a "world premiere" at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse, a "thumbs up" from Steven Spielberg, and a cavalcade of warmly received screenings including some at the Anthology Film Archives, which brought it back this week. With the help of friends who got $10 tickets at 6 pm for the 8 pm screening, I just saw it myself in all of its low fidelity, fell under its hypnotic spell, and greatly enjoyed the Q&A with director-performer Eric Zala and star Chris Zompolos, both very good storytellers with very good stories to tell.

One of the exciting things about watching this work is seeing how creative the low-budget copying can be. With very few resources and no video reference source for a substantial part of the shoot, the filmmaking kids worked their way through this major Hollywood film, coming up with at least some kind of solution for most of the challenges they faced—including the melting people, Myra. The more you learn the backstory, the more you can appreciate the risks and the tenacity involved. For the kids participating in the project—and the adults in their orbits—the effort was akin to that behind the making of Apocalypse Now.

If you want to get in tonight, get in line early! And wear layers so you can stand outside in the cold and be comfortable in the warm and crowded theater.

Click here for more info.

And here's a revealing interview with the filmmakers.



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PLAYING AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

Perhaps you noticed the WWW episode that mentioned Supervision, the very obscure TVTV excursion into surrealistic television history. I'm a big fan of it myself—perhaps the biggest fan of it in the world! Once upon a time I managed to find installments of Supervision at the Museum of Television and Radio, where they were scattered willy-nilly amidst recordings of PBS Visions episodes from the 1970s.

This stuff is so obscure that it wasn't even included in an MTR salute to TVTV, but it looks like Anthology Film Archives will screen one Harold Ramis-directed installment in a fascinating program scheduled for Friday night at 8 pm. (There's a chance that it isn't technically part of Supervision, but I'm sure it's close enough.) Here's the description, from Anthology's website:

ALL CIRCUITS ON: THE BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
What on earth did people do before there was TV? Tonight's sophomore installment of ALL CIRCUITS ON attempts to answer this burning question with a panoramic presentation of videos, performances and fun-filled facts. Engineer/Filmmaker/Philosopher Park Doing will be on hand to tell us the true story of early TV; how it was created, contested and co-opted. You may not know that in 1928 the first live drama broadcast, a three-camera production called THE QUEEN'S MESSENGER, was received on a General Electric Octagon set in Schenectady, New York. In 1931, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) broadcast experimental signals from the Empire State Building, featuring a familiar cartoon character, Felix the Cat. Prof. Doing, whose forthcoming book from the MIT Press is titled VELVET REVOLUTION AT THE SYNCHROTRON, will shine a light on the story behind and technology involved in these nascent broadcasts. He will even have some of it on hand for a show-and-tell demonstration. You haven't seen anything till you've witnessed a functioning Mechanical TV, or the films that Doing has made with this odd and wonderful device. This talk will be presented alongside a staged re-telling of TV's origins by TVTV and, well, one of the best uses of the medium thus far, THE GONG SHOW.

ALL CIRCUITS ON is a new Anthology series produced in close collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video and media art since 1971. Together we are revisiting our roots, combining forces and bringing our archives together to increase the potential for rarely-screened works from the early days of video exploration (which is to say pre-1979)....

Works to be screened include:

TVTV
BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
1977, 18 minutes, video. Directed by Harold Ramis; written by Frank Cavestany, Hudson Marquez, Harold Ramis, Michael Shamberg, and Willie Walker.
A fictional, at times satirical portrayal of the rise of television and the death of radio, rooting the story in a greater American mythology. The historic figures of Philo Farnsworth, Edward Armstrong, and David Sarnoff are reduced to archetypes in a stand-off between the little man and Big Media. By now, we know who wins.

Tony Labat & Bruce Pollack
BRUCE AND TONY ON "THE GONG SHOW"
1978, 28 minutes, video.
Tony Labat and his frequent collaborator Bruce Pollack created an appropriately absurd performance for their appearance on the popular American variety/talent show. In a line-up that includes a man singing "God Bless America" through his nostrils and a woman who bends herself into a pretzel, Bruce and Tony manage to present a performance so absurd it defies ridicule. See it to believe it.

Also at Anthology this month: Unamerican Activities: The Films of Abraham Polonsky and several days of ephemeral oddities (September 20-23), including Why We're Fat, a program of nutrition documentaries curated by Skip Elsheimer (September 21 at 8 pm).

Here's Eat for Health, one of the films on the nutrition program.



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