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What was cut from the 7 hour version?
I miss some movies we were in. There used to be really funny stuff like ‘I Was A Teenage Werewolf’ and ‘Return of the Ape Man’. That’s how it is now. A lot of it goes back to the beginning, but some things are different.
I’m trying to imagine an editing room back then with reels all over the place. Do you have an image in your head about that era?
Well, it’s all edited on 16mm, spliced and taped. It was very difficult because there was a lot of film. Every time I found a new one I had to plug it in and run it to see if it worked. It took a long time. The reason we did this was because back in the late 60’s we had the concept of “camping”. Susan Sontag popularized the phrase in the sense that people laughing should be taken seriously.
What I wanted to ask you about is that this movie came out in 1968, and many of the movies and TV shows were made a little earlier. In the late ’60s and ’70s, the film seemed like a nostalgic film to younger audiences, but today it seems like an absurd window into the past. Have you noticed that over the years, and by the generations that have seen the film, the reactions to the film have varied greatly?
The only difference I saw was based on the fact that the popularity of the thing was originally there. It was based on the fact that many things contained within it were childhood things they hadn’t seen since childhood and now unlocked within them . brain. Oh my God, “Tales of Texas Ranger”, I used to watch it when I was 7 years old. Or Froggy the Gremlin, or anything else that resonated with people. Today, most of them… strange. I remember showing it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her niece, who was about 14 years old, was with her friend, and she saw her about an hour and a half later, and asked, “Is this not working?” She said, “I don’t understand anything about this.” [laughs] And I think a lot of people look at this today and say, ‘I don’t know what the hell they’re going to do here. It’s like an early YouTube mashup.
I’m sure you’ve always loved monster movies and sci-fi B-movies, but does it bother you that today’s audiences are laughing at some of the movie clips? I know you’re not a fan of audiences who go to see old movies just to sneer, but “The Movie Orgy”” It seems to be set up so that laughter is allowed. How do you feel about that? Have you ever struggled with that?
No, I never disagreed about that. I always felt that “The Movie Orgy” celebrated the work rather than just making fun of it. If you’re going to make fun of something for five hours, it’s kind of nihilistic. The idea was to explore the shortcomings of what we always worshiped as children, how it changes as we grow up, and how things have changed politically, the Defenders of Things like American cards, what they look like today, and so on, that there’s a lot of humor involved. It was the opposite of what they looked like at the time. So it’s a time capsule. There are some slow stretches, mostly during “College Confidential”. Still, I think it’s a lot of fun to spend 5 hours.
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