Oddball Films Media
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Jun 25, 2016
Oddball Films present The Bradbury Chronicles, a program of ultra-rare adaptations of the short stories of the literary giant Ray Bradbury from the 1950s-1980s all screened on 16mm film from the archive. Bradbury's vivid imagination created some of the most fantastic of worlds, and chilling of prophecies for our own world and since his passing, science fiction and literature have never been the same. Join our host Fred Astaire in a future world of computerized justice and body swapping in an episode of the Hitchcock-produced series Alcoa Premiere: The Jail (1962), penned by Bradbury himself. The Veldt (1978) gives us the proverbial nuclear family in a fully-automated home with a virtual reality nursery that leads the children of the house to use it for catastrophic ends. Zero Hour (1978) counts down to an alien invasion with the help of a gaggle of creepy children and their interactive board game. Plus, Bradbury talks about his process in an excerpt of Writers on Writing (1965), a condensed version of It Came From Outer Space (1953), and early arrivals will be treated to a feverish episode of Ray Bradbury Theater: The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1988) starring Michael Ironsides as a frantic man mere moments after a murder. Join us as we salute the man, the myth and the machines and characters his mind created.
Date: Thursday, June 30th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Featuring:
Alcoa Premiere: The Jail (B+W, 1962)
A rare lost TV episode of the short-lived show Alcoa Premiere hosted by Fred Astaire, written by Ray Bradbury, and executive produced by Alfred Hitchcock.
Forty years in the future, the courtroom is mechanized with primitive computers and tape machines, and a week's trial now lasts 3 minutes. The "jury" "thinks" onto a punch card which is fed to the "judge," which passes sentence. The defendant only has "the tapes" to explain what happened and the government has decided to do psychological experiments using sick and well people who are forced to exchange bodies.
Zero Hour (Color, 1978)
A new batch of creepy children from Ray Bradbury. This adaptation centers around a little girl who is beyond excited to play her new game "Invasion" with her friends. As she rushes around, gathering supplies, the mother thinks little of it, but as the game continues to count down to zero hour; mom begins to wonder where this invasion is actually coming from and what will happen when the clock stops ticking. This same story was the inspiration for the recent ABC miniseries: The Whispers.
The Veldt (Color, 1978)
A creepy and chillingly adapted short story by Ray Bradbury. Parents George and Lydia live with their two children Peter and Wendy in "The Happylife Home," a fully automatic residence with machines that do everything for them. The two children are especially taken with the nursery, a room with virtual reality that will recreate anything their brains desire. The parents begin to worry as the pair spend more and more time in the nursery, which seems to be permanently fixed on African grasslands featuring a pair of lions gruesomely gnawing on bones in the distance. When George and Lydia decide to move out to the country to get away from their computerized domicile, the children and lions have other ideas. Co-starring a 12-year-old Jason Bateman.
It Came From Outer Space (B+W, 1953)
Catch all the highlights of Jack Arnold’s classic alien invasion film in this short excerpted version. A small desert town gets all stirred up when a mysterious flaming object falls from the sky. Soon, the town’s residents aren’t quite who they were before and we’re left wondering, “When will they be back?” Based on a story by Ray Bradbury and starring: Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake, Joe Sawyer, Russell Johnson, Kathleen Hughes, and more!
For the Early Birds:
The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (Color, 1988)
A killer episode of Ray Bradbury Theater starring Michael Ironsides as a man just moments after killing his boss. He reminisces on the murder as he attempts to erase all evidence of him in the crime scene. In his frantic state, can he possibly remember all the things he touched while inside the house?
Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.
About Oddball FilmsOddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. To search through over 20,000 clips of our unique footage, check out our website at http://www.oddballfilms.com/.
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.
