Page 114 – Spectacle Theater

SOMETHING ELSE: A CELEBRATION OF ORNETTE COLEMAN ON FILM

Posted on June 24, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

You can’t see outside yourself, but we do have imagination. The expression of all individual imagination is what I call Harmolodics. Each beam of imagination is their own unison and there are as many unisons as there are stars in the sky. — Ornette Coleman

ALL WEEK LONG from July 17 – 23!

Spectacle presents a special tribute to the great ORNETTE COLEMAN beginning July 17th, featuring a week-long run of Shirley Clarke’s recently preserved ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA. Artist C. Spencer Yeh will present his original rendition of Conrad Rooks’ 1966 film CHAPPAQUA with Ornette Coleman’s original score – there is no existing version of the film with this score in place. We’ll also be screening ALL MAGIC SANDS/CHAPPAQUA by experimental filmmaker Andrew Lampert, which combines Ornette Coleman’s The Chappaqua Suite with a lost and found feature-length Christian children’s adventure film shot the same year The Chappaqua Suite was recorded.

ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA
Dir. Shirley Clarke, 1985
USA, 85 min.

FRIDAY, JULY 17 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 18 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY–TUESDAY, JULY 19–21 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY–THURSDAY, JULY 22–23 – 10:00 PM

Advance tickets available here.

Ornette Coleman told his bandmates not to follow him, but to be with him. Shirley Clarke’s documentary eschews conventions to create a fittingly free-form portrait of one of the most original innovators of all time. Clarke began filming with Ornette Coleman in the 60s, and her film documents the evolution of his life and work over three decades, incorporating performance footage, conversation with his friends and fellow musicians, his return to his boyhood home, recreations of his childhood, and experimental riffs that could only result from a deep and fertile creative connection between filmmaker and subject.

Friends, collaborators and admirers appearing in the film include Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Buckminster Fuller, Yoko Ono, Robert Palmer, Jayne Cortez, George Russell, Denardo Coleman and John Rockwell.

Special thanks to Milestone films.

CHAPPAQUA with Ornette Coleman’s CHAPPAQUA SUITE
Dir. Conrad Rooks, 1966 | Remixed by C. Spencer Yeh, 2015
USA, 48 min.

FRIDAY, JULY 17 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 19 – 5:00 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 21 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 23 – 7:30 PM

Advance tickets available here.

C. SPENCER YEH PRESENTS HIS OWN RENDITION OF CONRAD ROOK’S CHAPPAQUA WITH ORNETTE COLEMAN’S ORIGINAL SCORE THE CHAPPAQUA SUITE.

Conrad Rooks wrote, directed and starred in this psychedelic cult film based on his own experiences with drug and alchohol addiction and his therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs to treat that addiction. CHAPPAQUA features appearances by Ornette Coleman (credited as “Peyote Eater”), William S. Burroughs, Jean-Louis Barrault, guru Swami Satchidananda, The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, Moondog and Ravi Shankar.

Conrad Rooks originally commissioned Ornette Coleman to score CHAPPAQUA, resulting in Coleman’s Chappaqua Suite. Upon hearing it, Rooks allegedly decided that the piece would overshadow his film and decided not to use it. In a tribute to Ornette Coleman, Spectacle presents its own rendition of CHAPPAQUA with Ornette Coleman’s original composition in place.

Special thanks to Milestone films.

SCREENING WITH:

POPULATION EXPLOSION
Dir. Pierre Hébert, 1968
Canada, 14 min.

A product of the first world’s population panic of the 60s and 70s, Pierre Hébert set his cut-out animation to a score by Ornette Coleman. He suggests that in many countries, freedom from famine and disease has created the new problem of overpopulation and that wealthier nations should increase all forms of aid to struggling nations.

Special thanks to the National Film Board of Canada.

ALL MAGIC SANDS/CHAPPAQUA
Dir. Andrew Lampert, 2012
USA, 80 minutes

SATURDAY, JULY 18 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 20 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 22 – 7:30 PM – FILMMAKER IN ATTENDANCE!

Advance tickets available here.

June 15-17, 1965. Ornette Coleman’s trio featuring guest Pharaoh Sanders and a small string orchestra records the soundtrack for Conrad Rooks’ in-progress feature film CHAPPAQUA. Upon listening, Rooks recognizes the exquisiteness of Coleman’s boisterous music, but believes it will overpower his imagery and instead hires Ravi Shankar to compose the score. Coleman’s unused recording is issued that same year as the double LP set CHAPPAQUA SUITE.

July 1965. Nashville TV bigwig Al Gannaway produces a 16mm Christian children’s adventure movie with the working title ALL MAGIC SANDS. The story centers on an orphaned quartet (boy, two girls, a baby) washed ashore on a desert island in what just might be the Bahamas. There, they encounter a pile of branches that transforms into a dubious Jesus-esque bearded man, as well as a doppelganger family of naked black children. A failed epic that is equal parts semi-professional production and curiously cruel home movie, the original footage was left sitting untouched for many decades in a lab that went out of business.

ALL MAGIC SANDS/CHAPPAQUA (2012) synchronizes reels from an unfinished film with a rejected soundtrack, both of which were originally created within a month of each other. Lampert acquired all the known camera footage for ALL MAGIC SANDS and has assembled the intact reels (takes, mistakes and re-takes included) into a sequence that, rather serendipitously, is nearly the exact same length as Coleman’s classic score. A darkly funny and deeply strange chance discovery that feels, in ways, tailor made, this unexpected pairing of exact opposites makes for strangely ideal company. Coleman’s emphatic performance infuses the eye-popping color footage with sorrowful undertones and mysteriously sympathetic resonances. Filled with flashbacks, fast-forwards, circular starts and loose ends, ALL MAGIC SANDS/CHAPPAQUA is a feature-length film made of just middle.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO POGO

Posted on June 22, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

DON’T BE AFRAID TO POGO
Dir. Chris Ashford, 2015
USA, 94 min.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15 – 10:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY! NEW YORK PREMIERE!

Spectacle is proud to present the New York premiere of DON’T BE AFRAID TO POGO, the story of 1970s punk band The Gears. Beginning as boyhood friends from North East Los Angeles, these musicians self-styled an infectious brand of surf/rockabilly/punk which they continue to play today. Despite local popularity and critical acclaim, the Gears rarely performed outside of Los Angeles, denying them the wider success that their contemporaries X, The Blasters, Los Lobos and The Germs would go on to achieve. DON’T BE AFRAID TO POGO chronicles singer Axxel G. Reese and The Gears’ history in rich detail, featuring rare archival footage and interviews with band members as well as Mike Watt (Minutemen), Johnny Stingray (The Controllers/Kaos), Billy Bones (The Skulls), Steve Metz (Mad Society) Miss Mercy (GTO’s), artist Richard Duardo and other punk luminaries. Featuring a soundtrack by X drummer DJ Bonebrake, DON’T BE AFRAID TO POGO is a heartfelt and overdue tribute to one of LA’s most underrated punk bands.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

Posted on June 22, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

PERSISTENCE OF VISION
Dir. Kevin Schreck, 2012
US, 83 min.

THURSDAY, JULY 30, 8 PM – DIRECTOR KEVIN SCHRECK IN ATTENDANCE
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Advance tickets available here.

Striving to make the greatest animated film of all time, visionary animator Richard Williams (Academy Award-winning animation director of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT) toiled for nearly three decades on his masterpiece, THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER — only to have it torn from his hands. Filmmaker Kevin Schreck has woven together mind-blowing animation, rare archival footage, and exclusive interviews with key animators and artists who worked with Williams on his ill-fated magnum opus to bring this legendary, forgotten chapter of cinema history to the screen for the very first time.

A tale of creative genius gone horribly awry, PERSISTENCE OF VISION is the untold story of the greatest animated film never made.

“An amazing film about an amazing artist. Rush out and see Persistence of Vision.” – Bill Plympton, acclaimed animator

“A fascinating slice of film history.” – Variety

“A Herculean accomplishment.” – indieWire

MONICA: THE WEBSERIES

Posted on June 11, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

SATURDAY, JUNE 27 – 8PM
ADVANCE TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE!
ONE NIGHT ONLY

For one night only, Spectacle is proud to present the new webseries Monica in full – bookended with stand-up comedy (featuring Jacqueline Novak, John Early, Cole Escola, Erin Markey and Chris Laker) before, and a Q&A with the creators of Monica – writer/director Doron Max Hagay, and star/cowriter Lily Marotta after.

How many puff pieces have pointed to the exhausted trope of the beloved national celebrity poor, downtrodden and wanting nothing more than to be a “normal human being”? Doron Max Hagay’s brilliantly high-concept Monica explores not just this question but also what said journey might actually have felt like for one Monica Lewinsky (Lily Marotta), relocating from DC to New York at the age of 27. Inspired by Vanessa Grigoriadis’ article “Monica Takes Manhattan”, the show centers on Lewinsky’s clinching of a deal with HBO to make what would become the 2002 documentary Monica in Black and White.

Alongside pointed jabs about showbiz, fame, and nascent Brooklyn yupsterism, Hagay’s approach is both generous and hilarious. It delineates the world of difference between insta-celebrity’s place at the end of the 20th century and its position today. In the aftermath of the Clinton Administration, all Monica can do is be herself, one day at a time. Hagay’s series brings her image back into the public arena not for a cheap laugh but instead in the service of long-overdue re-normalization, whereby her quotidian triumphs and travails begin to look more and more like anybody’s from their mid-to-late twenties.

“Before hitting the show, Monica’s design buddy (Steven Phillips-Horst) suggests she swap a black baseball cap in place of the black beret; Monica: “Too Monica?” At the end of the doc pitch, the execs bid her “Welcome to HBO”; in response, her publicist floats: ‘Welcome to Monica.’ A cautious tale, Monica’s, foreboding the modern era of social media, shaming, trolling, deprivacy — like the moon, she belongs to everyone, though just out of reach.” – Craig Keller, Cinemasparagus

CORMAN IN THE CARIBBEAN

Posted on May 31, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

Legendary producer-director Roger Corman was at the height of his prolific creative powers when Puerto Rican tax incentives sent the enterprising filmmaker and his crew—including future CHINATOWN screenwriter Robert Towne—to San Juan to make a movie. It ended up being three: while wrapping THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH, Corman called up his LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS screenwriter to draft the script for CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, and in the meantime he financed a quickie war picture, BATTLE OF BLOOD ISLAND. As a complement to our “Waves of Mutilation” series, we present “Corman in the Caribbean,” a pair of beachy island horror movies to cool off at the end of hot summer days.

CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA
Dir. Roger Corman, 1961.
USA/Puerto Rico. 75 min.

TUESDAY, JUNE 2 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 11 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17 – 10:00 PM

Recently emboldened by shooting THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS in two days on a successful bet, Corman squeezed an extra movie out of his and his LAST WOMAN ON EARTH cast’s plane tickets by calling up screenwriter Charles B. Griffith (recently of LITTLE SHOP and A BUCKET OF BLOOD) to crank out a new script. The result is another madcap macabre satire that knowingly plays its low budget for big laughs.

Commenting on history as it unfolds, CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA was shot during the waning days of Cuba’s Batista government. It’s narrator introduces a story of “robbery, double-cross, and murder,” in which Renzo Capeto (Anthony Carbone), an American gambler and con man, is hired by Batista’s generals to help them abscond with the Cuban treasury. While fleeing revolutionaries by sailboat with secret agent “XK150”—played by future Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne—on board as an infiltrator, Capeto hatches a plan to knock off the Cubans one-by-one while blaming it on a fictitious sea monster. Or is it fictitious? In a knowingly absurd twist, it just so happens that the same monster he’s invented just happens to be lurking beneath their vessel.

In few movies is the fun the cast and crew were having so apparent on screen. One gets the sense of the movie as a “working vacation,” and Griffith’s script provides the perfect opportunity for no one to take themselves too seriously: Towne might not have cut it as a leading man, but he and Carbone are perfect in their roles as deadpan hams. And yet against all odds, the movie is recognized by Corman as one of his most personal. Everyone is an inept con, there are no heroes—and in the end, the guy in the cheap monster suit with tennis ball eyes wins.

LAST WOMAN ON EARTH
Dir. Roger Corman, 1961.
USA/Puerto Rico. 75 min.

TUESDAY, JUNE 2 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 9 – 7:30 PM

The first and bigger of Corman’s Puerto Rican thrillers, Last Woman on Earth is shot in widescreen color (advertised on the poster as “Vistascope”) and makes beautiful use of the Caribbean scenery. Anthony Carbone plays a wealthy industrialist on vacation with his wife in Puerto Rico—and as a workaholic, he brings along his young attorney (screenwriter Robert Towne, billed as “Edward Wain”) to discuss business matters. After scuba diving, the trio emerge to discover that apparently all oxygen had vanished, and and few people are left alive. While facing an uncertain future, new personal dynamics begin to develop among the three.

LAST WOMAN ON EARTH is a pithy doomsday thriller in the mold of THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL that doubles as a bourgeois critique. (For an auteurist reading, one can’t help but speculate about Corman’s own workaholic tendencies and estrangement from Hollywood’s monied elite.) One of the oddest pleasures of the film is Robert Towne’s frankly kind of bad performance as the young lawyer: according to Corman’s autobiography, he had taken so long, by Corman’s standards, to finish the script that the only way Corman could afford to fly him out to finish the script was to hire him as the co-lead. (Take a moment to let the logic of that settle in.) Nevertheless, he gets an A for effort.

CINAP CINATAS

Posted on May 29, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

CINAP CINATAS
Dir. Darren Bauler, 2015 (compiled from source material 1982-1990)
USA, abt. 40 min.

THURSDAY, JUNE 4 – 7:30PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

“When the black stars align, you will be given a sign.”

In a time of the evils of role-playing games, the “audio pornography” of blood-spitting pentagram-wearing heavy metal, the rise of VHS Video Nasties and the political atmosphere of the Reagan reinvention of the Republican party as the home of the Moral Majority, the time was right for a decade-long consideration of what was known as Satanic Ritual Abuse. I (Darren) honestly believe there is an amazing documentary possible weaving all these threads into a cohesive whole, free of both right-leaning hysteria and leftist dismissal. This is not that documentary. Instead, it is a gratuitous blur of backmasking, Christian scare films, prime-time documentary footage, law enforcement training videos and more, edited for maximum nod freakout. We tag all the familiar bases here, from the Judas Priest trial to Ricky Kasso’s brutal murder of Gary Lauwers and subsequent suicide, along with many cases lesser-known these days. We look at brainwashing, hidden messages, desecrated cemeteries and endless throngs of kids with Venom patches and upside down crosses carved into their arms. Intended NOT to be a tongue-in-cheek goof nor a serious warning about the evils of the occult, it is our hope this experience stands outside simple opinion or smug dismissal. With an entirely new score written and performed by the director, CINAP CINATAS is necessary viewing for teenage delinquents, 80s fetishists and anyone curious about the “Occult renaissance” claimed over the past few years.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: animal sacrifice, child molestation, occult rituals, multiple unedited crime scenes, potentially seizure-inducing strobe effects, Geraldo Rivera

CRITICAL PARANOIA: DARK NIGHT RISING

Posted on May 29, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

CRITICAL PARANOIA: DARK NIGHT RISING
A collection of conspiracy videos edited & curated by Ernest J. Ramon, 2015
USA, 87 min.

MONDAY, JUNE 1 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 7 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 16 – 10PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 30 – 10PM

You’re not allowed to believe in coincidences anymore. A Fast encroaching military police state, mind controlled assassins, domestic terrorism, secret societies, ritual sacrifices, clandestine psy-op programs, evil old billionaires clamoring for world domination! Tired old plots of a comic book franchise or prophetic and deliberate enigmas wrapped in bubblegum and subterfuge? Who or what really killed Heath Ledger? Has the Dark Knight vehicle become nothing more than a harbinger for horrors such as the Sandy Hook and Aurora Shootings, and the events of September 11th? What is the true meaning hidden behind the Dark Night Rising? Over the rainbow and through the looking glass, how deep does the rabbit hole go? All the way to a bat cave perhaps.

BASEMENT MEDIA FEST

Posted on May 28, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

THE 5TH BASEMENT MEDIA FEST
Dir. Various
Various countries, approx. 75 mins.

THURSDAY, JUNE 25 – 7:30PM AND 10PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

THE BASEMENT MEDIA FEST IS A SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS WORKING WITH LO-DEF, LO-TECH, AND LO-FI MOTION PIX TECHNIQUES.

FOUNDED IN RESPONSE TO HI-RES COMMERCIAL MEDIA AND CORPORATE-SPONSORED FILM FESTS, BASEMENT IS A CELEBRATION OF THE MEDIATED EXPERIENCE AS AN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE. WE’LL BE PRESENTING A MIXD PROGRAM OF CELLULOID AND .MOVS. COME ENJOY SOME 100 YR OLD TECH IN A STATE OF THE ART CONVERTED BODEGA THEATER.

Yates – The Bags, Probably 1971 – 5 mins

Jarrett Hayman – Me, Dancing – 2 mins

John Wilson – How To Remain Single – 17 mins

Amelia Johannes – Family Crockery (Whiteness) – 2 mins

Eric Stewart – Wake – 8 mins

Paul Turano – Toward the Flame – 5 mins

Jared Hutchinson – The Infinity Scroll, pt. II – 3 mins

Hannah Piper Burns – Outer Darkness – 11 mins

Henning Frederik Malz – Rest in Me – 6 mins

Felipe Steinberg – Tudo Referente a Frio: Rua César Bierrenbach, 181, Campinas – 15 mins

PITTSBURGH POLICE SHORTS

Posted on May 28, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

PITTSBURGH POLICE SHORTS
Dir. John Marshall, 1974
USA. 71 minutes.

FRIDAY, JUNE 5 – 7:30PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 19 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, JUNE 22 – 7:30PM

Manifold Controversy (3 min)
Vagrant Woman (8 Mins)
Youth and the Man of Property (7 mins)
After the Game (9 Mins)
Two Brothers (4 min)
A Forty Dollar Misunderstanding (8 min)
Henry is Drunk (7 Min); Wrong Kid (4 min)
Twenty-one Dollars or Twenty-one Days (8 Min)
You Wasn’t Loitering (6 Min)

John Marshall captures moments of contact between the people of Pittsburgh and their police, in this selection of ten observational vignettes filmed between 1969 and 1970. Cops interact with feuding families, irate customers, drunk drivers, vagrant divorcees and teenage glue-sniffers, bullying, negotiating, and mediating by turns.

Marshall was commissioned to make these films in part for police training purposes, and he gained a remarkable level of access to the Pittsburgh officers. A Cambridge, MA documentarian best known for his tender ethnographic/advocacy filmmaking with the !Kung people of the Kalahari, Marshall finds some humor and humanity in the daily police work grind – without losing sight of the abuses of power that happen in meetings between the cops and city residents. There’s not much point in asking to see a warrant in late 60s Pittsburgh, that’s for sure, and rounding up kids into a van for a trip to the station is a lawman’s staple of the time.

Some of the filmed scenarios feel obsolete, like when officers quietly hand over cab fare to a man who’s too drunk to drive in “Henry is Drunk.” Others seem depressingly contemporary; in “Twenty-one Dollars or Twenty-one Days” a black youth is sentenced to a fine or prison time on the basis of a vague accusation from a policeman. Made in an era before cameras became common tools for monitoring the police, (and long before TV’s Cops), the Pittsburgh Police shorts are revealing historical documents about a policing system that’s the not-too-distant ancestor of the one we live with today.

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT

Posted on May 28, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT
Dir. Ramon Zürcher, 2013
Germany, 72 min
In German with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JUNE 13 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 28 – 5:00 PM

Ecstatic yet precise, Ramon Zürcher’s debut feature deconstructs the domestic drama of a day in a Berlin apartment to riveting effect. Family tensions share dramatic weight with falling orange peels, a spinning bottle, a broken washing machine, a hair in a glass of milk; all the small, private moments in a day are disclosed like secrets. In meticulously simple framing and painterly light, the film finds the beautiful and the alien in everyday life.