Weirdsville 10: Lonely Boy and More at Oddball Films January 8, 2010

Event: “Weirdsville: Oddities from the Archives”. Guest curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rare, weird and some highly entertaining 16mm shorts, movie trailers and commercials culled from the 50,000+ archive at Oddball Films. This month’s highlights include: “Lonely Boy”, pre-Beatles mania over… Paul Anka; “De Düva”, hilarious Bergman spoof; “Fun On The Run”, more cross-dressing antics with Abbot and Costello; “A Journey”; mysterious train ride to Weirdsville; “Allegro Ma Troppo”, a stunning stop motion portrait of Paris; “Brooklyn Goes To Las Vegas”, hammy travelogue of Vegas; plus movie trailers, commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!
Date: Friday, January 8, 2009 at 8:30PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco 94110
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.flarerecord.com/?p=453
"Weirdsville”
Oddities From The Archives
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, January 8, Guest Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of the strange, the bizarre, and the sometimes baffling short films, commercials and trailers from deep within the Oddball archive. These “found” films surface in the process of research for other programs: too good to languish on the shelves, they demand to be screened! Weirdsville is a monthly companion program to the Strange Sinema series. Showtime is 8:30PM and admission is $10.00. Seating is limited so RSVP is preferred to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117.

Highlights Include:

Lonely Boy (Dir. Roman Kroiter/Wolf Koenig, B+W, 1962)
A pioneering cinéma vérité portrait of teen idol Paul Anka, Lonely Boy captures all the hysteria and hyperbole in a pre-Beatles pop frenzy. Screaming, swooning teens, sleazy managers and all the minutia of a pop idol on tour- all utilizing the “direct cinema” technique utilized to great effect in D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back. Of course, Paul Anka is no Bob Dylan, but that does not stop Anka’s manager from proclaiming him on camera “the most important artist since Shakespeare” (with all sincerity). This is brilliant, fascinating filmmaking with an air of the tragic (given Anka’s subsequent career trajectory). In French and English.

De Düva (Dir. George Coe/Antony Lover, B+W, 1968)
Nominated for an Oscar (Best Short Subject - Live Action) in 1969, this short parodies three of Ingmar Bergman's films - Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and The Silence. It also marked the first film role of Madeline Kahn. Speaking in mock Swedish, with English subtitles, a retired physicist with a hernia recalls, while sitting in an outhouse, a garden party he attended as a youth. In a game of badminton rather than chess, Death loses his intended victim because of a hilarious obstacle - a dirty pigeon. Director George Coe was one of the original cast members on the first three episodes of Saturday Night Live. And scriptwriter Sid Davis, who also plays the role of Death, is perhaps best known as a director/producer of educational safety films; he was also a long-time body double for John Wayne. (Tom Warner)

Fun On The Run (B+W, 1945)
Condensed from the Abbot and Costello feature film Here Come The Coeds, Fun On The Run has Lou in drag joining a women’s basketball to defeat the “Amazons”. After a bump on the head, he’s convinced he is the basketball star Daisy Dimple and cannot miss a basket…

Allegro Ma Troppo (1963, Paul Roubaix)
A Parisian evening, conveyed through automatic cameras and imaginative cinematography of the life of Paris between 6PM and 6AM shot at two frames per second utilizing automatic cameras. From strippers to car crashes, Paul Roubaix’s “Allegro Ma Troppo” evokes the intensity and variety of nocturnal life in the City of Light through speeded-up action, freeze-frame, and virtuoso editing.

A Journey (Dir.Bogdan Zizic, Color, 1972)
A meditation on time, life and death, human connection in this dreamlike, wordless film from Yugoslavia. Passengers on a train disappear one by one whenever the train emerges from a tunnel…

Brooklyn Goes To Las Vegas (B+W, 1956)
A palooka travelogue of Sin City narrated by Arthur Cohen in thick Brooklynese. Great shots of long faded sights and nightspots, including a kooky routine by comedy dinosaurs “The Ritz Brothers”.

PLUS- movie trailers, commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!

Curator Biography:
Pete Gowdy (aka DJ Chas Gaudi) is host of San Francisco’s Shellac Shack, a weekly 78 rpm listening party and a DJ specializing in vintage sounds: soul, jazz, country, punk and new wave. A graduate of the Vassar College Film Program, he is an associate producer of Marc Huestis Presents, the long-running movie legend tributes at the Castro Theatre.

Upcoming Programs
Fri Jan 15 – Tin Pan Alley & The Jazz Age– With Live Performance by “The Dimestore Dandy”!
Sat Jan 16 –
Fri Jan 22 – Whatever Happened To Susan Jane? – DVD Release party with Director Marc Huestis in attendance!
Sat Jan 23 –
Thu Jan 28 – Lost Animation Fest - The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne (1957)
Fri Jan 29 - Lost Animation Fest – 2 programs! (TBA at 8:00/10:00PM)
Sat Jan 30 - Lost Animation Fest – 2 programs! (TBA at 8:00/10:00PM)

About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.  
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educationals, 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.

Official Website: http://www.flarerecord.com/?p=453