Cocaine Abuse: End of the Line (Color, 1984, excerpt) Hosted by Richard Dreyfuss, this PSA is aimed at the corporate businessman, rather than the kiddies and gives just enough of a taste of the high-powered drug problem that was the scourge of the business world in the eighties! The Perfect Powers Girl- John Robert Powers (B+W, 1941) A soundie rarity that teaches us the blight of the 1940's businessman in his search for love and the new fall look. Opens on an executive office with a man singing about women’s fashion. We see various models advertising his products, and another man sings about… Read more
Oddball Films brings you Wanderlust - The Romance of Transportation, an evening of vintage 16mm films about our need to travel and the planes, trains and automobiles (and boats and motorcycles) that make it possible. From jet-setting promotional films to safety scare films to charming historical animation, this program is sure to move you! Get jet-setting with the sizzling trailer for the 1969 sleaze classic The Stewardesses and motoring with the original trailer for Easy Rider, and then get ready to see the world, Pan Am's World (1966) with this stylish and beautiful promotional gem. Peter… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Mid-Century Modern Animation , a program of stylish, clever, and award-winning cartoon shorts that are unmistakably mid-century with a color, feel and shape all their own. The mid-century modern style began in the late 1940s with John Hubley's UPA cartoon shorts in which he began straying away from the established realism of early animation, opting instead for a style of "limited animation" influenced by the art and design of the times, especially atomic-age design. Detailed backgrounds gave way to minimalist shapes and blobs of colors, human… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ vast collection of 16mm film prints. Drawing on his archive of over 50,000 films, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has complied his 77 th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 77: Sixties Synesthesia takes a heady sideways look at the multimedia art forms and kinetic uprisings of the tumultuous 60s featuring a vast array of evolutionary artists, cultural critics and eye-popping moving art. Films include segments from… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present The Twenties Aplenty: Saucy, Sassy, Silly . . . and How! The Jazz Age left us a bizarre record of itself and we’ll draw from newsreels, cartoons, stag curios, art film and comedy classics to get a little taste of that seemingly carefree time. The high-divers, whip-tricks and acrobatic feats of Oddball Stunts (1929) might seem antiquated, but they’re still jaw-dropping. The Fleischer Brothers and Betty Boop keep the flapper alive in 1930’s Any Rags? Laurel and Hardy get caught with their pants down in Liberty (1929), one of their best… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Spectral Cinema: Frightening Films for Friday the 13th with a selection of obscure horror shorts, haunting excerpts and spooky-kooky cartoons from the 1930s-1980s. Anjelica Huston stars in the made-for-tv adaptation of William Faulkner's Victorian haunter A Rose for Emily (1983). A man's conscience and a ghostly heartbeat won't allow him to get away with murder in a noiresque version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart (1971). Spencer Tracy imagines a Hell full of thousands of writhing bathing beauties in a haunting excerpt from Dante's… Read more
Oddball Films presents Will Vinton's Claymation Marvels, an evening celebrating the work of one of the most creative and entertaining animators of all time, Will Vinton. The winner of an Academy Award, numerous television Emmys, and international animation awards numbering in the hundreds, Vinton used Claymation, a term he trademarked, to great effect in his early career and later bringing to life iconic advertising characters the California Raisins and M&Ms. Vinton began experimenting with clay animation in college and his breakthrough short Closed Mondays (1974) garnered him… Read more
Sink your fangs into delicious excerpts from the famous Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, a confection that introduced the legendary Count Dracula and his spider eating minion Renfield to the silver screen. silent cinema trailers featuring Lon Chaney Sr. as Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame (1925), and as a deformed phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House in Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Paul Leni’s expressionistic comedy horror film The Cat and the Canary (1927) inspired by Broadway stage plays and the cornerstone of Universal Pictures horror genre; Dracula (B+W, 1931) In this… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present What the F(ilm)?! 6: Cine-insanity from the Archive an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. This time the cine-psychosis includes a pubescent musical with 16-year-old Paula Abdul, baby olympics, giant talking bars of soap and even singing harem dogs! Featuring Junior High School (1978), a hilariously awkward musicalamity featuring a 16 year-old Paula Abdul and a cast of gangly teens and preteens singing and dancing about the " Itty Bitty Titty Committee", wearing a cup in gym class and… Read more
Oddball Films presents Visionaries of Dance, a sumptuous evening of rare 16mm films dedicated to the innovators of the art of dance and the transformative nature of film to bring that art and beauty out in new and imaginative ways. The grande dame of modern dance, Martha Graham, brings us into her studio as her dancers demonstrate the techniques created and imparted to them by the pioneering dancer and choreographer in A Dancer's World (1957). Alvin Ailey forever changed the landscape of the dance world; view some of his most important works in the ultra-rare PBS documentary Alvin Ailey:… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes the Klik! Amsterdam Animation Festival on its epic West Coast tour for a screening of Midnight Madness, the strangest of the strange from their annual international animation submissions. Every year the KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival team receives and works through 1500+ animated shorts. There are those films that make you go, “What the flying fu¢k were these people thinking/sniffing/smoking?” And, “Where can we get some more of that good stuff?” To share this wonderful feeling of alienation, bewilderment, and delight, KLIK! and Oddball Films present you with the… Read more
Oddball Films presents The Saul Bass Treatment , an evening of films showcasing one of the 20th century’s legendary graphic designers, filmmakers and title producers - Saul Bass . The man responsible for some of the most easily recognizable corporate logos, film posters and film title sequences was–in his own right–an incredible, visionary and award-winning filmmaker. Films include documentary Bass on Titles (1982) featuring the man himself musing on the creation of some of the designer’s most iconic title sequences from such films as Man with a Golden Arm, It’s a Mad Mad Mad World, Seconds,… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema , a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from the collection. Drawing on his archive of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 76 thprogram of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 76: Expanded Cinema features a tour-de-force of Oddball’s favorite short films-in a multiple projection format! Combing through the archive for multiple prints of his favorite films, Parr will expand the cinema experience by utilizing multiple projected overlays, tele-… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator/archivist Scotty Slade invite you to Beyond Words: The Art of Communication , a presentation of 16mm films and live poetic performances exploring the need for and the many faces of language. Although the likes of Plato and Socrates had already postulated as much, it wasn’t until the year 1964 a.d. that the wizard and media theorist Marshall McLuhan finally broke the spell the phonetic alphabet had placed on us with his famous statement, “ the medium is the message .” Where we were once free-loving, non-questioning, less than consciously aware-of-its-effects-on-… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson...about your Feelings: An Emotional Shockucation, the fifteenth in a series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month we're dealing with our emotions; those mighty forces of rage, pain, fear and love! A white-coater explains the basic emotions and uses the tale of angry young Jeff to explain how anger can ruin everybody's day in the mental-hygiene classic Control Your Emotions (1950). Can young Kristy McNichol change… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present A Global Childhood: The Cinema of Youth . From the marvelous to the melancholic, silly to the sublime; this program is an exploration of a whole range of youthful emotion, using scenes from world cinema classics from France, India, Japan, Spain and Canada and some of our favorite domestic educational shorts. Highlights from the enduring and beloved Pather Panchali (1955), by India’s master filmmaker Satyajit Ray, prove the wonders of childhood are universal. Being the new kid in town stinks all over the world: in Japanese director N. Terao'… Read more
Oddball Films invites you to join original Cockette Rumi Missabu for a screening of the compelling feature documentary Uncle Bob about the life and death of infamous Oscar streaker Robert Opel. This riveting documentary profiles performance artist Robert Opel, the man who "streaked" the Oscars in 1974 and was murdered in his homoerotic art gallery South of Market in 1979. His nephew, Robert Oppel revisits the lasting legacy and untimely passing of a cult figure who had the balls to bare it all. The film features Divine, John Waters, David Niven, Mike Douglas, Bea Arthur & Abel Ferrara… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Monty Cantsin present Type-Rites, a whirlwind cine-tour of typewriting: The World's Fastest Typist! The Bird That Could Type! Typewriter Percussion! And more! For one night only, we'll take in the sounds, sights, scenes (and sexual politics) of this beloved/outmoded (electro)mechanical device, by way of various nearly-forgotten artifacts of 20th Century cinema. A wide ranging program with forays into poetry, office rituals, letter-writing, and early computer technology, Monty Cantsin's live 90-minute multi-projector mix will include additional materials dug up… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Fostering Genius: The Best of the National Film Board of Canada , with a program of exquisite and award-winning short films, animation and experimental works, all from the NFB. In honor of the 75th Anniversary of the NFB and what would have been the 100th birthday of Norman McLaren; we have this hand-picked selection of clever, hypnotic, mind-blowing, and often politically progressive work of some of the best innovators Canadian cinema has to offer. The very coolest of the cool, George Kaczender's The Game (1966) is the ultra-hip coming of age… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present What the F(ilm)?! 5: Cine-insanity from the Archive an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. In this edition, we've got clown-faced mental hygiene primers, talking horses, grandpas gone AWOL, a claymation tooth rock opera and doll parts flying everywhere! We've got the small screen oddity Mae West Meets Mister Ed (1964) in which Mae West, playing herself, asks Wilbur to come on up and redesign her stables sometime. In If Mirrors Could Speak (1976) , a straight-talking looking glass gets… Read more
