The first “feature film” by Joe Dante was this mind-roasting four-and-a-half hour found footage collage that was without precedent in 1968 and remains an eye-opener. THE MOVIE ORGY is almost certainly Dante’s purest expression of the love of mid-Twentieth Century trash culture and cheeky sense of humor that have powered his subsequent filmography.
…this mind-roasting four-and-a-half hour found footage collage that was without precedent in 1968 and remains an eye-opener.
The 22 year old Joe Dante put this compilation, which had an initial running time of seven hours(!), together with the help of fellow film collector (and future AIRPLANE! and ROBOCOP producer) Jon Davison, and screened it to great success on college campuses via an interactive two projector “mix.” It was followed by the 3½ hour SON OF MOVIE ORGY in 1972, and two years later by MOVIE ORGY RIDES AGAIN. The original film was “retired” in the mid-seventies but revived in the 00s at LA’s New Beverly Cinema and various film festivals, in a print from which “two hours had somehow disappeared” from the original seven hour length (as for SON OF MOVIE ORGY and MOVIE ORGY RIDES AGAIN, both appear to be MIA).
The original film was “retired” in the mid-seventies but revived in the 00s at LA’s New Beverly Cinema and various film festivals…
Included are clips from TV dramas, commercials, game shows, cartoons, public service spots and, of course, movies. In the days before home video and the internet such a collection of celluloid ephemera was quite a get, and Dante flaunts it in an exuberant torrent that anticipates the VHS mix tapes that proliferated in the eighties and nineties video underground (TV SCHPINCTER, CATHODE FUCK, THE AMOK ASSAULT VIDEO, etc.) and the found footage extravaganzas of Craig Baldwin (TRIBULATION 99, SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM, etc.), as well as the countless YouTube compilations that followed.
Included are clips from TV dramas, commercials, game shows, cartoons, public service spots and, of course, movies.
THE MOVIE ORGY isn’t entirely anarchic. It includes lengthy sequences from various B movies, including THE ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMAN, HOT ROD, THE GIANT GILA MONSTER and EARTH VERSUS THE FLYING SAUCERS, which are periodically interrupted and returned to at various points throughout the film. The object, it seems, was to approximate the feel of TV channel surfing (a la 1987’s AMAZON WOMEN IN THE MOON, portions of which were directed by Joe Dante), with all the movies concluding around the same time, resulting in an astounding orgy of wonton destruction that takes up much of THE MOVIE ORGY’S final half hour (followed by multiple “THE END”’s).
Also featured is the title sequence from THE NAKED CITY followed by a clip from a vintage stag film, thus literalizing the “naked” part of the title—an example of Dante’s penchant for poking fun at his clips. Another example would be a psoriasis commercial followed by a B-movie clip of a man with a severely mutated face, and Alfred Hitchcock in the middle of televised spiel getting interrupted by an off-screen thump—which is revealed to be stock footage of an atomic bomb. Then there are those clips that are so outrageous they don’t need any editorial enhancement, such as an advertisement for a “Judeo-Christian watch” that includes a literal trip to Heaven–an ad Dante wisely presents in its jaw-dropping entirety.
Also featured is the title sequence from THE NAKED CITY followed by a clip from a vintage stag film…
Other enjoyable elements include a newsreel snippet proclaiming that “Enemy bombers in theory are approaching America’s greatest city!,” a TV variety show whose host attempts to entice a woman into sticking a hand into a box he claims contains live rats (a clip that nowadays would probably be considered un-PC) and a movie scene with a woman and her black maid that amply demonstrates the casual racism that infected American film and television in the mid Twentieth Century. We also see examples of something that hasn’t appeared on American television screens in nearly fifty years: cigarette commercials, which were banned three years after THE MOVIE ORGY’S inception.
Beyond that THE MOVIE ORGY functions as an irreverent encapsulation of American popular culture of the era (it can be viewed as the filmic equivalent of the 1968 book SEVEN GLORIOUS DAYS, SEVEN FUN-FILLED NIGHTS, which described a week-long TV binge), with footage you probably won’t see anywhere else. As for a future DVD release, Dante is adamant there won’t be one due to rights issues (none of the clips shown in THE MOVIE ORGY were properly licensed, and in many cases Dante “didn’t even know what some of the stuff was”) and the fact that the film “only works with an audience, with a crowd.” I’m not sure I agree, but can say this is a film that, for once, is well worth going out of one’s way to experience.
Vital Statistics
THE MOVIE ORGY
Director: Joe Dante
Producer: Jon Davison
Editor: Joe Dante