The Movie Orgy

MOVIE #1,874 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.12.24 As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been in a bit of a rut doing this site/watching movies in general. To snap out of it, I’m mixing things up here in August. For starters, I’m taking the first and last full weeks of the month off to give myself some space (a buffer, as it were, for my insane posting regiment). And in between I’ll be doing three full Director Focuses — spurred by my recent trip to the Mahoning Drive-In and Allentown, PA (more on this later) — the first of which starts today and is a big one: the filmography of Joe Dante. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at one single director and digested (binge-watched, as the kids say) all of their work in order, unadulterated and unencumbered.

So welcome to SEVEN DAYS of DANTE! I’ll be traversing all of Joe’s directorial work in both movies and TV (and more). Here’s the schedule:

• DAY 1: Feature Films — 1968-1981
• DAY 2: Feature Films — 1984-1990
• DAY 3: Feature Films — 1993-2014
• DAY 4: Anthology Features
• DAY 5: TV Part 1
• DAY 6: TV Part 2
• DAY 7: TV Movies + Miscellaneous

All toll, this will account for 33 works when it's said and done on Sunday.

We kick things off in fitting, ridiculous fashion with Dante’s first credit: the epic proto-supercut The Movie Orgy, a collaboration with producer Jon Davison. Dante first started assembling the feature — which was an ever-evolving entity that ran north of seven hours long at its lengthiest cut — as a college student. The collage of movie stills it opens with is the perfect summation for what it’s all about…

The film — culling liberally from the B-movie cinema of Dante and Davison's youth (including brief clips from The Phantom Planet and Teenagers from Outer Space), early TV commercials, newsreel footage of early A-bomb tests, cartoons, westerns, sci-fi, bloopers and war movies as well as clips from children's TV shows — assembled without permission of the clips' owners, toured colleges and repertory cinemas with support from Schlitz beer… [it] was designed to be a free-flowing, communal audience experience. Interactivity (e.g. sing-alongs to showcased television show theme songs) was encouraged.

So in that spirit, I did not sit and watch it (I procured the five-hour edit) in one sitting. In fact, I’m only about a ⅓ of the way through as I write this. I’ve been viewing his other early features in between digesting 20-40 minutes of The Movie Orgy. I recommend this technique.

The film really captures the feeling/odd desire to not only process and remember media, but to tangibly capture it forever. I can recall being a young child, not yet ten years of age probably, and randomly messing with blank tapes and our VCR, the vague, unknowable sense that everything on my TV was important in some weird way/was shaping me (even if I couldn’t articulate this at the time). It’s the product of a true love of cinema, and ALL media really. This love for the good, the bad and everything in between is central in most of Dante’s work, whose movies — even at their most refined — still breathe with an air of campiness and schlock. I’m excited to dig in.

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The Movie Orgy is a 1968 film directed by Joe Dante and produced by Jon Davison. It was an evolving compilation of film clips, commercials, and film trailers, initially assembled by Dante when he was an undergraduate at the Philadelphia College of Art. At its longest, it ran for seven and a half hours and could be considered the analog prelude to the mash-up videos and supercut edits now prevalent on digital platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. It was released on April 1, 1968.