Weirdsville 13 at Oddball Films April 9, 2010

Event: “Weirdsville: Oddities from the Archives”.  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: The Game (1966), great unknown sixties mod coming-of-age story!; Calling All Girls (1942), astounding Busby Berkeley clips plus how they selected the girls for the chorus lines; Baggage (1969), weird pantomime/art film shot at the San Francisco Airport; Birds, Bees and Storks (1970), hilarious animation featuring Peter Sellers; The Munchers: A Fable, creepy animated teeth battle Jack Sweet; plus movie trailers, commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!
Date: Friday, April 9, 2010 at 8:30PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/Weirdsville_13_PR.pdf
"Weirdsville”
Oddities From The Archives
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, April 9, 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:

The Game (Dir. George Kaczender, B+W, 1966)
This great, lost coming-of-age story filmed in Montreal in 1965 is the very definition of cool- sort of a short , artier Quadrophenia (though no Sting sightings). They're high school punks - they play rock music on the beach and in the garage. They stay up late and have sex in cars. They pick on each other and talk about girls. The super cool garage music written and performed for the film- a must see!! Director Kaczender went on to direct In Praise of Older Women with Tom Berenger and Karen Black (but don’t hold it against him).

The Munchers: A Fable (Color, 1973)
Really creepy stop-motion animated teeth get duped and tortured by “Jack Sweet” until they turn the tide with whatever toothpaste put up the money for this funky little gem which seems to have been inspired by a bad acid trip (along with 90% of everything made in 1973). Great wah-wah guitar soundtrack.

Calling All Girls (B+W, 1942)
Compilation of astounding sequences choreographed by the genius Busby Berkeley. The first few minutes of this short show the process that studios used to select the girls for the chorus line. The following numbers from his popular 1930s musicals are then presented: "Don't Say Goodnight" from Wonder Bar (1934); "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) ; "Shadow Waltz" from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933); and "By a Waterfall" and "Shanghai Lil" from Footlight Parade (1933).

Baggage (Alexander Neel, B+W, 1968)
Attention masochistic mimophobes! The “First Lady” of mime, Mamako Yoneyama, carries her "baggage" of psychological & emotional restrictions and struggles to free herself from it. Set in San Francisco in the unspecified future.

Birds, Bees and Storks (Dir. John Halas, Color, 1965)
A father sets out to explain the facts of life to his son, but becomes increasingly embarrassed to the point where his explanations are so vague as to be incomprehensible.

Inspired by Gerard Hoffnung's 1960 book of the same name, this is a delightful and all too familiar study of the embarrassed middle-aged British male, as a father attempts to explain the facts of life to his son but ends up delivering a monologue so packed with euphemisms about birds, bees and butterflies that it ends up being totally incoherent.

Produced by the esteemed Halas & Batchelor Animation Studio, the visual style (inspired directly by Hoffnung's drawings) is simple in the extreme - for much of the film, we just watch the father squirming and blushing in his chair, which focuses our attention both on Peter Sellers' monologue and director John Halas' subtle visual characterization, all nervous tics and fidgeting.
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.

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.