Film Room Schedule – Friday

Friday Afternoon

4:00 pm: Rocky Jones–Space Ranger

Rocky Jones, Vena Ray, and ten-year-old Bobby cruise the galaxy in their space ship in this typical television space opera. The episode we are running, Pirates of Prah involves space piracy, hijacking, and everything else a kid in the fifties would want to see in a television show. 16mm, 30 min

4:30 pm: Space Sentinels–"Space Giants"

Hal Sutherland’s action animation show involves three Greek gods transplanted into the future where they do good and battle evil. We’re showing an episode called Space Giants in which they battle evil giants. Everything is cut and dried and the good guys always win, and that’s the way it should be.
16mm, 30 min

5:00 pm: Our Man Flint

James Coburn plays secret agent Derek Flint in this marvelous spoof of James Bond films. Chasing eco-terrorists while surrounded by teams of beautiful women and improbable gadgets, he saves the world in the second reel and then saves the world again in the fourth. If anything, it’s interesting to watch how Austin Powers seems like a pale and crude imitation of Flint.
16mm, 1 hr. 48 min

Preceded by Heave Away. This short film on the decommissioning of a spacecraft is set to music by Helva Peters.
16mm, 6 min, Color by RGB/DuArt

 

Friday Evening

7:00 pm: The Comédie-Française

The Comédie-Française has been performing live theatre since 1680, and since that time has been on the forefront of theatrical technology. This is a backstage tour of the famous French theatre, with visits to the flyloft, the costume shop, and the carpentry shop. It includes some beautiful images of theatrical productions, and is a must-see for anyone interested in costuming or stagecraft. Shown by special request.
16mm, 60 min.

8:00 pm: It’s All About Love

Just your ordinary romantic drama about star-crossed lovers. Oh, except that it takes place in a dystopian future where climate change is turning the world into a frozen wasteland. The Village Voice calls it “rapturous and inexplicable in equal measure.”
35mm Cinemascope, 1 hr. 45 min

Preceded by a short episode of Clutch Cargo. A curious product of the early 1960s, this is an animated children’s television show employing Synchro-Vox, a process in which live action lips were rotoscoped onto still drawings. The plotlines and the artwork both owed a lot to the pulp SF styles of the day and were quite advanced for a kid’s show of that era.
16mm B&W, 6 min

11:00 pm: Metropolis

This restored version of the silent Fritz Lang classic is considerably longer than the commonly-shown 1927 cut. The image quality is better than you have ever seen and it will be presented with our own Gary McGath at the organ and with two short intermissions.
35mm, 2 hrs, 4 min.

Preceded by film footage from Denvention 3. We wandered around the past Worldcon with a prewar-vintage newsreel camera and got shots of a lot of different parts of the con, then edited them down. Come and see yourself and your friends and the people you meant to see at the con but missed.
35mm, 6 min.

Film Room Schedule – Saturday

Saturday Morning

9:00 am: Pinocchio in Outer Space

Written by Fred Ladd and Norm Prescott who later went on to introduce America to Japanese animation, this film was animated in Belgium and involves Pinocchio taking a trip to mars to stop a giant space whale. Extremely silly, it’s the sort of thing you and your kids should be sitting down to watch together on Saturday morning.
16mm, 1 hr. 11 min

Preceded by Fred Ladd and Osamu Tesuka’s short animated version of Beauty and the Beast, a nicely done bit of early Japanese animation.
16mm, 12 min.

10:30 am: Bamboo Saucer

This cold-war-era thriller involves a flying saucer hidden in a Red Chinese village and the American and Soviet teams that converge on it and find they have to work together to complete their missions. It’s dated today, but it’s surprisingly well produced and still holds up very well.
16mm, 1 hr, 40. min. Eastman LPP Color.

Preceded by three Roger Ramjet cartoons of extreme silliness.
16mm, 18 min.

 

Saturday Afternoon

12:30 pm: SF Films to See

PANEL: What are the essential SF films you MUST see before you’re abducted by aliens or reincarnated? What makes them so important?

1:30 pm: Last Battlestar

PANEL: After the long hard journey it seems the refugees of the Colonial fleet had finally come to journey’s end—or have they? With only a few episodes left, there are still several unanswered questions.

2:30 pm: NASA Documentaries

This year we’re stacking two of them together, with Stepping Stones To Space, a historical look at rocket propulsion from ancient China to Apollo, followed by SIR-A, showing the first images from the Shuttle Imaging Radar, a side-looking radar system intended to view the earth’s surface. Presented with the assistance of the film archives at Marshall Space Flight Center
16mm, Approximately 30 minutes

3:00 pm: Astro-Nut Cartoons

Astro-Nut is a short green being from outer space who is always trying to help out his friend Oscar. Unfortunately his help is not always very helpful. We’ll be showing a sequence of cartoons including Proton Pulsator, Martian Recipe, and whatever else comes to the top of the pile.
16mm. Approximately 30 minutes.

3:30 pm: Customs and Immigration

Every year we make a point to run some sort of avant-garde film that stretches people’s idea of what a movie should be, and this year we have picked a film by J. Hoberman, the long-standing film critic of the Village Voice. This film combines new and stock footage with a disconcertingly eerie soundtrack to describe a half-dozen risky new ways for visitors to America to go native.
16mm, 34 min. Color By DuArt

Preceded by History of the Automobile, a short film describing the evolution of transportation in a parallel universe.
16mm, 6 min.

4:30 pm: Space Sentinels—Space Giants

Hal Sutherland’s action animation show involve three Greek gods transplanted into the future where they do good and battle evil. We’re showing an episode called Space Giants in which they battle evil giants. Everything is cut and dried and the good guys always win, and that’s the way it should be.
16mm, 30 min

5:00 pm: Repo: the Genetic Opera

This is a fantasy horror musical about a world in which medical insurance is nonexistent and where if you take out a loan for an organ transplant, you’d better make sure you can pay it. Cindy says, “Take painkillers first.” It’s silly, it’s horrible, it’s a musical with real opera singing, Anthony Stewart Head, and Paris Hilton. How can you go wrong?
35mm, 1 hr. 38 min

Preceded by History of the Automobile, a short film describing the evolution of transportation in a parallel universe.
16mm, 6 min.

 

Saturday Evening

7:00 pm: Rhapsody of Steel

Former Disney animator John Sutherland’s 1959 classic details the history of steel from the first meteor to strike the earth to the first manned rocket to leave it. Time Magazine called Sutherland a “slick entertainer and painless pedagogue.” Our print is in excellent condition with beautiful color.
35mm Technicolor Dye-Transfer, 23 min.

7:30 pm: Next Door

A sobering story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., about what happens when an imaginative young boy is left alone with nothing but a television set, a radio, and a real life drama next door. Directed for WGBH in 1976 by local filmmaker Andrew Silver with lighting by the late Minor White.
16mm, 28 min.

8:00 pm: This Island Earth

This film is probably best known for having been made fun of by Mystery Science Theater 3000, but in fact it’s one of the more thoughtful SF films of the fifties, with shifting alliances, evil invasion plots, and Earth scientists caught in-between.
35mm Cinemascope, 1 hr. 27 min. Color by Technicolor

9:30 pm: Westworld

During Michael Crichton’s long life, he wrote a large number of screenplays that all centered around technology going terribly wrong but ingenious humans managing to overcome it. Perhaps the best film he ever made on that theme was Westworld, and with his recent death we’d like to comemmorate his work. Delos is the vacation of the future, today. At Delos you get your choice of the vacation you want, but you probably haven’t bargained for Yul Brynner as a murderously malfunctioning robot. This film is in the process of being remade; see the original before it’s too late.
16mm, 1 hr. 28 min

11:00 pm: Battlestar Galactica

It has come to our attention that many members of the younger generation do not realize just how bad the original Battlestar Galactica was. Therefore in conjunction with the Institute For Very Bad Cinema, we are presenting the original theatrical film released to coincide with the original television series. Although beautifully photographed, the wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and ludicrous plot make this a film to be laughed at and we invite you to come and do just that. This film has previously been used by the San Bernardino poison control center to induce vomiting.
35mm, 2 hr. 28 min. Presented in original Sensurround.

Film Room Schedule – Sunday

Sunday Morning

9:00 am: Zardoz

In this British production, a wild but intelligent savage (played by a young and well-muscled Sean Connery) hitches a ride on a flying head made of rock and arrives in a land of immortal lotus eaters. Well, disgruntled immortal lotus eaters. An odd and understated film, this is one of the rare productions that is more interesting than its trailer.
16mm, 1 hr. 45 min.

11:00 am: The Ugly Little Boy

This is a 1977 adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s story about a child from the Neanderthal being brought into the future, and how the dispassionate nurse hired to take care of him became a friend. It’s a lovely little adaptation that doesn’t get seen much today.
16mm, 26 min.

11:30 am: Rocky Jones—Space Ranger: "Pirates of Prah"

Rocky Jones, Vena Ray, and ten-year-old Bobby cruise the galaxy in their space ship in this typical television space opera. The episode we are running, Pirates of Prah involves space piracy, hijacking, and everything else a kid in the fifties would want to see in a television show.
16mm, 30 min.

Noon: The Movie Year In Review

PANEL: Our annual look back at the year in SF, horror, and fantasy film. Our panel of experts will cover every theatrical release of 2008. Time for audience participation is reserved for the end of our panel’s high speed review.

 

Sunday Afternoon

1:30 pm: Our Man Flint

James Coburn plays secret agent Derek Flint in this marvelous spoof of James Bond films. Chasing eco-terrorists while surrounded by teams of beautiful women and improbable gadgets, he saves the world in the second reel and then saves the world again in the fourth. If anything, it’s interesting to watch how Austin Powers seems like a pale and crude imitation of the amusingly overstated Flint.
16mm, 1 hr. 48 min.

Preceded by Heave Away. This short film on the decommissioning of a spacecraft is set to music by Helva Peters.
16mm, 6 min, Color by RGB/DuArt

3:30 pm: Westworld

During Michael Crichton’s long life, he wrote a large number of screenplays that all centered around technology going terribly wrong but ingenious humans managing to overcome it. Perhaps the best film he ever made on that theme was Westworld, and with his recent death we’d like to comemmorate his work. Delos is the vacation of the future, today. At Delos you get your choice of the vacation you want, but you probably haven’t bargained for Yul Brynner as a murderously malfunctioning robot. This film is in the process of being remade; see the original before it’s too late.
16mm, 1 hr. 28 min.

5:00 pm: Ultra-Q

We will be presenting an episode from the first Japanese SF television series ever made. Produced by Eiji Tsuburaya who later went on to make such hits as Ultraman, it is actually a very thoughtful program that seems to owe a lot to the Twilight Zone. Oh, except for the Japanese monsters. At this point we don’t know what episode we’ll be showing except that we guarantee it will be in Japanese with live translation, it will never have been shown in the US before, and it will be from the 1965 season.
16mm, 30 min. In Fuji B&W.

5:30 pm: God Mazinger

Episode 10 of Go Nagai’s 1983 Majin Densetsu anime series. Teenager Yamato Hibino has been sucked through a time warp into the past, where she helps Queen Aira of Mu to fight against the dinosaur army of the Dragonia Empire with the help of the stone guardian God Mazinger. In the original Japanese with live translation. Brand new print that looks fabulous.
16mm, 30 min, color by Tokyo Film Labs.

 

Sunday Evening

6:00 pm: Trailer Park

Everybody’s favorite event! Two hours of trailers for movies you love, movies you hate, and movies you’ve never heard of!
2 hr., In damn near every format made.

8:00 pm: Repo: the Genetic Opera

This is a fantasy horror musical about a world in which medical insurance is nonexistent and where if you take out a loan for an organ transplant, you’d better make sure you can pay it. Cindy says, ”Take painkillers first.” It’s silly, it’s horrible, it’s a musical with real bel canto opera singing, Anthony Stewart Head, and Paris Hilton. How can you go wrong?
35mm, 1 hr. 38 min

Preceded by History of the Automobile, a short film describing the evolution of transportation in a parallel universe.
16mm, 6 min.

10:00 pm: To Be Announced

This slot is being held open until the last minute in expectation of something so exciting we’d have to shoot you if we told you about it.

Midnight: Contact!

Do you remember the 1970s when you could go into a movie theatre and see fine quality pornography with a huge audience? Chip Delaney does, and he talks about seeing just this movie. Now you can have the same experience, but only if you are 18 years or older and have identification available when the doors open. This fine X-rated film stars Renee Bond which alone makes it worth the price of admission.
16mm, 1 hr. Color by Eastman Negative Process.

Film Room Schedule – Monday

Monday Morning

 

9:00 am: Audience Choice

We will run any of the films listed for this weekend. You must arrive at 9 AM in order to cast your vote. Film will begin promptly at 9:15 after setup and preparation.