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Learn your Lesson from Aliens: An Extraterrestrial Shockucation - Fri. May 13th - 8PM

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Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson from Aliens: An Extraterrestrial Shockucation, the 38th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month we are headed out of this world and out of our minds with one of the most bonkers and baffling installments yet with all the best/worst low-budget aliens you've never seen teaching you lessons in safety, grammar, peer pressure, and inappropriate touching. Meet Bub from the planet Bubbylonia - a woman in a fat suit and an arts and crafts project - that's on our planet to learn all about touch; the good, the bad, and the creepy in Bubbylonian Encounter (1983). Though not an alien herself Guardiana: Safety Woman was endowed her incredible powers by a ship of chipmunk-voiced aliens and we'll see the extraterrestrial results in one of the most ridiculous superhero trilogies you'll ever see.  Watch her close encounter, her transformation and then watch as Guardiana saves kids from drowning and falling of cliffs in In Danger Out of Doors (1974), she confiscates a gun and stops a house fire in Harm Hides at Home (1974), and she saves kids from pedestrian and bike fatalities in Peril Rides the Roads (1974). We've unearthed another frighteningly fuzzy chapter of the furry orange Saturnian blob: Adventures of Trogmoffy: Timmy and Margaret Meet the Creature (1971). Tag along with sequin-clad alien Aarak and his TV-headed robot sidekick as they crash land on Earth and try to classify fauna in Mission Third Planet: Creatures of the Land (1979). And our favorite double-headed puppet alien teens are back with a cautionary tale of heading to "the outer limits" with pills and sex in Deciso 3003 (1983). Plus, more intergalactic snippets and surprises, it's a stellar night to learn your lesson!


Date: Friday, May 13th 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:


Adventures of Trogmoffy: Timmy and Margaret Meet the Creature (Color, 1971)
The furry stuff of nightmares! Timmy and Margaret are just two kids out for a stroll in the woods when they come across something that would make most people scream, a giant orange fuzzy alien from Saturn named Trogmoffy.  Instead of peeing their pants and running back home to tell the Weekly World News, Timmy and Margaret help the disgusting creature learn proper English grammar. 



Bubbylonian Encounter (Color, 1983)
Learn all about good touches and bad touches from a craft-project-wearing "alien" named Bub from the planet Bubbylonia, a planet without the sense of touch. Bub lives in an invisible bubble that protects her from the world around her but also inhibits her from the joys of touching.  When a science class bursts her bubble, Bub needs a crash course in the sense of touch - from the good to the naughty - which includes what she calls "Pretendovision" where she's suddenly vaseline lensed and in a crib crying for a bottle. From the Kansas Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, this is an epic low-budget hand-made head-scratcher!

The Entire Guardiana: Safety Woman Trilogy!
Karen Kingsley is an accomplished architect and a volunteer crossing guard who - after an extraterrestrial run-in with some friendly safety-loving aliens - is transformed into a calamity-fighting superhero (as if she needed another part-time job).  When children in mortal danger cry out for help, she dons her silver lamé jumpsuit, her frisbee-looking shield and a wand that looks like a sex-toy and transports to the rescue.

In Danger Out of Doors (Color, 1974)
Guardiana saves a couple of boys from drowning and one from falling off a cliff. Let's all give the Guardiana salute! Alert, Aware, Alive!


Harm Hides at Home (Color, 1974)
Watch out for that fire on the stove and that gun in your dad's file cabinet, or don't and let Guardiana give you a nice long lecture after saving your life.

Peril Rides the Road (Color, 1974)
Guardiana is traffic-stopping in this bike and pedestrian safety short. 

Mission Third Planet: Creatures of the Land (Color, 1979, Don Klugman)
During a meteor shower, the robot Ten-Ping and Aarak, a young gold and sequin-clad alien scientist, are separated from their mother ship and stranded on Earth. While awaiting rescue, they begin classifying the land animals of the planet, comparing body structures of both vertebrates and invertebrates with the help of Ten-ping's magical TV screen head!



Deciso 3003 (Color, 1982)
Peter Wallach, Eli Wallach’s brother directed this bizarre anti-drug PSA, in the height of the “Just Say No” ‘80s. Two couples of double-headed alien teens set out on what they think is just going to be any other intergalactic trip to the Drive-In (to see Vincent Price in The Fly) but when one of them thinks it’ll be cool to take some meteor pills and get handsy with his date, we all learn that being a teenager isn’t easy for anyone in the galaxy. The puppets were made by Julie Taymor, director of Across the Universe and Titus, and Eli Wallach narrates, though neither is credited on the internet movie database. Perhaps, like the teen alien flying home alone, they too feel the shame.

Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.

About Oddball Films
Oddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Metamorphic Cinema: Meditations on Transformation - Thur. May 12th - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents Metamorphic Cinema: Meditations on Transformation, a multi-genred evening of 16mm short films and animation reflecting on mutations and transfigurations. From mesmerizing time-lapse nature films to jaw-dropping animation, evolutionary musings to early cinema magic - including several new dazzling films from the depths of the archive - it's a one of a kind program celebrating the beauty of change. Films include legendary outsider filmmaker Sid Laverents' homegrown nature film The Butterfly with Four Birthdays (1965) in which shedding the cocoon is likened to getting "out of a girdle with a belt on and your hands tied behind your back,"Transformation (1901), a super-rarity from turn of the 20th-century France featuring Méliès-like special effects transforming a lady magician into an ever-changing butterfly among other things.  The brilliant animator Peter Foldes gives us two hallucinatory metamorphic shorts: Hunger (1974), a disturbing early computer animation criticizing over-consumption in a world struck with famine and the collage and cell-animation Go Faster (1971) commenting on man's reliance on the rat race. Evolution goes at hyperspeed in the one minute cartoon Ecomega (1972), and gets a jazz-grounded claymation treatment in Eliot Noyes' Oscar nominated Clay or The Origin of the Species (1964). Mysteries of Plant Life (1940s) offers us masterful time-lapse photography of plants and flowers as they grow and bloom with sublime Kodachrome color cinematography from the pioneering photo-innovator Arthur C. Pillsbury. James Gore's Sixshortfilms (1973) is a stream of consciousness animation of faces warping into demons and birds transforming into telephones to strange and surreal effect. Bert Haanstra's Oscar-winning short Glass (1958) displays the hypnotizing art of glass-blowing with a soundtrack by the Pim Jacobs Quartet. Plus Bill Plympton's Your Face (1987) and a metamorphic pre-show from the Moody Institute of Science.


Date: Thursday, May 12th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com


Featuring:

Transformation (B+W, 1901)
Camera magic from 115 years ago! This uncredited Pathé Fréres rarity is making its Oddball debut. A female magician enters and bows before a stage. She produces a number of illusions, appearances and disappearances that are rendered by using Méliès-esque camera techniques such as the stop trick including turning herself into a marble bust, pulling babies out of a giant cabbage and dancing with butterfly wings that change shape and pattern with each flap.

Sixshortfilms (Color, 1973)
A pen on paper, stream of consciousness animation from director James Gore. Funny, creepy and thought-provoking, faces become monsters, birds become telephones, and all reason floats out the window.

The Butterfly with Four Birthdays (Kodachrome Color, 1965)
A fascinating little gem of a homemade nature film from outsider filmmaker Sid Laverents. Laverents (1908-2009) performed as a one man band in the Vaudeville days and only started making films in his late 50s but went on to become one of the most celebrated amateur filmmakers of all time. This charming backyard nature doc (literally filmed in his backyard over a number of years) features an oft subjective and quirkily colloquial narration. As the caterpillar attempts to shed his skin, our narrator intones ''This is sort of like trying to get out of a girdle with a belt on and your hands tied behind your back." At the end of the film, Laverents winks at the audience by filming a beautiful girl holding a butterfly and showing off more than her insect friend before getting yelled at by his wife.


Clay or The Origin of the Species (B+W, 1964)
The Academy Award-nominated stop-motion film from Eliot Noyes Jr. offers a kinetic take on Darwin’s revolutionary work. Backed by a swinging jazz tune, clay takes form as everything from primordial ooze to carnivorous creatures, devouring, dividing, and dancing to the rhythm. It’s survival of the fittest, and this crowd-pleaser stands up. Beginning with a simple graphic motion on the clay ‘sea’ from which forms of life emerge and the play, watch as the evolving organisms devour one another and morph into worms, gorillas, mermaids, clams, lions, whales and other animals, climaxing with the creation of a human!

Glass (Color, 1958)
Brilliant Academy Award winning short juxtaposes traditional glass blowing with “modern” glass manufacturing. Made by Bert Haanstra (Netherlands), the wordless Glass is a near perfect film, perfectly balancing images and rhythm with the wonderful cool jazz soundtrack by the Pim Jacobs Quintet. 


Ecomega (Color, 1972)
A 1 minute animated take on human evolution ending in the polluted demise of humanity. Dark and humorous. Directed by James Duron and David Stipes.


Hunger (Color, 1974)
Brilliant, disturbing, landmark early computer animation by Peter Foldes, this mind-blowing short is one of the most mesmerizing films of the entire collection. Characters morph and cannibalize in this mesmerizing Pop Art short, with a super cool soundtrack by Pierre Brault. A bleak comment on gluttony, greed, lust and consumerism with a literal take on "eat the rich". One of the very first computer animated films and one of the most mind-blowing films of the collection.

Go Faster (Color, 1971)
The pace of modern life demands that we constantly go faster, often forgetting where we are going, according to this satirical animation from the brilliant Peter Foldes. Modern man is shown to be at the mercy of his car, although on the surface he seems to have made it suit his needs. Our hero shaves, dictates letters, watches T.V., eats, drinks and makes love to his secretary - without budging from behind the wheel. Everyday the routine is the same, increasingly faster and more perfunctory. He is indifferent to the changing scenery. Nothing changes even when he exchanges his car for a boat, or a plane, or a spaceship. At last he begins to wonder what it’s all about. The film speculates that man’s machines serve him efficiently, but the resulting way of life gives little pleasure or sense of purpose.

Mysteries of Plant Life (Kodachrome Color, 1940s, excerpt)
Watch as plants grow with the help of microcinematography and time lapse photography in this gorgeous kodachrome nature film photographed by inventor and photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury, inventor of the panorama camera and innovator of time-lapse and micro-photography. A mesmerizing treat in breathtaking color from one of America's premiere photo-innovators!



Your Face (Color, 1987)
This film set the style and started career of famed animator Bill Plympton. One of the most popular short films ever made, it’s still showing all over the world. As a second- rate crooner sings about the beauties of his lover’s face, his own face morphs into the most surreal shapes and contortions imaginable. The music was written and sung by Maureen McElheron, then slowed to sound like a man’s voice because Plympton was too cheap to hire a male singer. Your Face earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short in 1988.


Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Rod Serling: Beyond the Twilight Zone - Thur. May 19th - 8PM

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Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Rod Serling: Beyond the Twilight Zone, an evening of 16mm films from the archive all featuring that shiver-inducing host: Rod Serling. While best remembered for his TV terrors, Serling also lent his inimitable voice to documentaries, PSAs and educational films, all of which we will be sampling. The night will include a devilish episode of The Twilight Zone: Of Late I Think of Cliffordville (1963), starring Julie Newmar as Miss Devlin who offers the man who has everything a chance to start all over again. Serling narrates the haunting and ponderous In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973, excerpt), a documentary that seeks to examine the link between aliens and the ancient world; giving responsibility to the star children for everything from the Mayan calendar to the Pyramids in Egypt. Serling helps navigate the social faux pas of the workplace in the bitchy educational short What Do We Look Like to Others? (1972). In The Alcoholism Film (1974), he offers a sobering checklist for the alcoholic as countless drunks offer their own horror stories. Plus, a rare sketch from The Garry Moore Show featuring a young Carol Burnett in an episode of The Twi-Night Zone: The Mosquito (1961), and an exciting episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau: Octopus, Octopus (1970) for the early birds. Get ready to travel through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, beyond the Twilight Zone!

Date: Thursday, May 19th 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Twilight Zone: Of Late I Think of Cliffordville
(B+W, 1963)

The very successful Mr. Feathersmith (played by Albert Salmi), having taken everything he ever wanted, is bored and wants to start all over. Since his soul is already possessed by the Devil, the price is his fortune to send him back in time. Eventually he must return to his own time, but things have changed. The stunning actress Julie Newmar is captivating as the most charming Devil you'll ever see.


In Search of Ancient Astronauts (Color, 1973, excerpt) 
An edited version of the 1970 German documentary "Erinnerungen an die Zukunft"(Chariots of the Gods), this examines the theory that aliens have landed on Earth in ancient times and were responsible for many of mankind's oldest mysteries including the pyramids, Easter Island, Stonehenge and more. Demonstrates these fascinating theories with visual "proof" from the ruins of ancient civilizations across the world. Narrated by The Twilight Zone's own Rod Serling.

What Do We Look Like To Others?
(Color, 1972)
In this quirky office dramatization, learn the importance of considering how others will see and judge you. The snide commentary of peeved coworkers makes us wonder no more “what do you really think of me?” From bad B.O. to skimpy skirts, everyone is a critic in this office of enemies with 
an added generous dollop of dread by Serling’s signature voice over.

The Alcoholism Film (Color, 1974, excerpt)
Welcome to the drunk zone.  Rod Serling addresses the camera to give everyone a list of the fifteen point checklist to determine who is and who isn't an alcoholic.  A number of scientists weigh in and scores of people offer their personal involvement with alcohol, including a young mother who is responsible for permanently blinding her daughter whilst on a bender.

The Twi-night Zone: The Mosquito (B+W, 1961)
A sketch from the Garry Moore show starring a young Carol Burnett.  This television oddity features a spoof of the Twilight Zone in which Burnett's mad scientist husband accidentally turns himself into a mosquito.

For the Early Birds:
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau : Octopus, Octopus (Color, 1970)
A thrilling adventure with the beanie-wearing crew of the Calypso as they swim with the misunderstood eight-armed cephalopod to Serling's authoritative voiceover. While Cousteau’s series often took the form of nature documentaries, episodes such as these contain the suspense and thrills of the adventure film. The aesthetics and tone achieved in the series have also been lovingly adopted and parodied in subsequent television shows (e.g. “Fishing With John”) and films (e.g. Wes Anderson’s Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). 

Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.

About Oddball Films
Oddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.


Film Under the Influence - Vintage Drug and Alcohol Scare Films - Fri. May 27th - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents Film Under the Influence - Vintage Drug and Alcohol Scare Films, a program of mind-expanding, terror-intending and hilarity-inducing short 16mm educational films about the dangers of drugs. It's a night of drunk embarrassing moms, rats on drugs, LSD freak-outs, bongo-beating beatniks, piles of pills, afterschool specials, and tons of hilarious new finds from the archive. These classroom classics from the 1960s through the 1980s were meant to scare the pants off the junior-high set but probably encouraged as many to experiment with drugs and alcohol as it discouraged. Join the "now generation" with their wacky tobacky, hallucinogens and goofballs in the mega-hip and stylish Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb (1969). One shaggy-haired pre-teen boy has a lot of questions but doesn't get a whole lot of answers in the oddly graphic What Do Drugs Do? (1971). Amanda Wyss from Nightmare on Elm Street has a nightmare of a drunk mother who passes out, ruins parents' day and stumbles into the school play in the ABC Afterschool Special She Drinks a Little (1981). Drop a tab of acid and sing along with the LSD song in the mind-bending hallucinogenic scare film LSD 25 (1967). Everyone's favorite pot-smoking and crime-fighting dog is back in the insane Canadian cartoon Caninabis (1979) and a bunch of drugged-up rats nod off, fall over and run into walls in a clip from Narcotics: The Inside Story (1967). Plus! The acid-soaked trailer for Easy Rider (1969), a barrel full of drug and alcohol PSAs including one from the "Fonz" himself Henry Winkler, an all-star alcoholic spectacular Drink, Drank, Drunk (1974) with Carol Burnett, Morgan Freeman and more for the early birds and more sobering surprises!


Date: Friday, May 27th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 

Featuring:

Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb (Color, 1969)
"This is the now generation... The age of bobby socks is gone"
A super groovy all around drug scare film for the teens and college kids, specifically the "now generation".  This howler includes pot parties, kids huffing glue, groovy psychedelic shindigs, LSD freakouts, bongo music and more! 



LSD-25 (Color, 1967)

A trip to the morgue was never this easy! This psychedelic scare film imitates cinema verite and television news techniques to propagandize its moralizing message of misinformation, fear and tragedy. Narrated by an LSD “molecule” “LSD-25” begins with teens gyrating in an underlit nightclub while a fake psychedelic band sings the “LSD-25” theme!


Drown, drown out your mind
You think you're seeing things I know you're blind
A million bright colors explode in your head
Today you're high, tomorrow you're dead

She Drinks a Little (Color, 1981)

A sobering ABC Afterschool Special starring Amanda Wyss (Nightmare on Elm Street) as a pretty teen girl suffering from her mother's embarrassing drinking problem. After her mother (played by veteran actress Bonnie Bartlett) lushes it up for parents' day, passes out on the living room floor in front of company and gets up on stage after her big debut in the school play, Cindy has had enough and decides to join Ala-teen.  The scene-by-scene inspiration for yet another episode of Strangers with Candy.

What Do Drugs Do? (Color, 1971)
A pretty shocking short for the elementary school set with a whole smorgasbord of tantalizing-looking drugs displayed and used on screen (including a heroin scene straight out of Trainspotting).  There aren't many facts used to bolster their argument and few warnings except "you never know".


Narcotics: The Inside Story (1967, excerpt)

Watch as lab rats take drugs and get crazy running into walls, dozing off, and falling over. These rats look like they're having one hell of a time!



Caninabis - The Junky Dog (Color, 1979) 

Yes, you read that right: CANINABIS!  This head-scratcher from the National Film Board of Canada chronicles the animated exploits of a scruffy street dog, who develops a taste (and smell) for that sticky icky icky, but uses his powers to help the police, where he is rewarded with huge joints for every drug bust.  But when the weed starts playing tricks on his mind, the scruffy mutt drops the ball and ends up on the street again, chasing tailpipes for one more high!




For the Early Birds:


Drink, Drank, Drunk (Color, 1974)

An all-star WQED production on alcoholism hosted by Carol Burnett with cameos by Morgan Freeman, Joe Bologna, Renee Taylor and more with alcoholic-themed game shows, melodramas, news briefs, and more.

Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.
About Oddball FilmsOddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Strange Sinema 100: Hypnotica - Thur. May 26th - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 100, a monthly evening of newly discovered films, rarities and choice selects from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled this 100th (!) program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This 100th program is a celebration of mesmerizing, hypnotic films, designed to push your perceptual boundaries.Strange Sinema 100: Hypnotica features a stunning, genre twisting mix of seminal, awe inspiring films, from trance-inducing visual poems, stunning Czech stop-motion animation and ethnographic rituals to meditative ruminations on higher consciousness. Films feature Man Ray's surrealist classic L'Etoile de Mer (1928) a haunting, dreamlike ode to subconscious sexual desire, Marcel Duchamp’s ground-breaking Anemic Cinema (1926), a hypnotic exploration of wordplay intermixed with optical illusions,  John Whitney's Arabesque (1975), the legendary masterpiece of shimmering, oscillating waves set to the music of Persian composer Maroocheher Sadeghi, Michael Whitney's Binary Bit Patterns (1969) a hypnotic psych-folk audiovisual experience that suggests a secret symbiosis between the digital and the organic as various Eastern graphic permutations appear, dissolve and undergo metamorphoses on the screen, Lapis (1965), made by a spiritualized James Whitney with handmade cels evoking a single mandala moving within itself; its particles surge around each other in constant metamorphosis, Tanka (1976) David Lebrun’s remarkable and fierce animated vision of ancient gods and demons in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s legendary ethnographic study Trance and Dance in Bali (1937-39), Glittering Song (1965) true hypnotica-this tantalizing object animation brings to life discarded shards of broken glass, transforming the dangerous trash into a sparkling magical world (a huge hit at our Czech stop-motion show), Spacy (1981) a stunning, unforgettable, hypnotic short by Japanese avant-garde maestro Takashi Ito, Dream of Wild Horses (1962), a remarkable cinematic poem using slow motion and soft focus camera to capture the wild horses of the Camargue District of France as they roam on the beach running through walls of fire and water, plus! The animated Felix Hyps the Hippo (1920s), featuring Felix the Cat hypnotizing a hippopotamus!



Date:
 Thursday, May 26th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 


Featuring:

Anemic Cinema (B+W, 1926, Silent)
Directed by Marcel Duchamp
“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” -Marcel Duchamp

The only film to come from the founder of the Dadaism movement (artistic and literary movement from 1916-1923 “Anemic Cinema” is an abstract and annalistic film short containing rotating circles and spirals interlaced with spinning discs of words strung together in elaborate nonsensical French puns.


L’Etoile de Mer (B+W, 1928)
a.k.a. The Star of the Sea and The Starfish Directed and written by Man Ray.
Based on a poem by Robert Desnos. A classic of Surrealist cinema, Man Ray’s L’Etoile des Mer (Starfish) is a haunting, dreamlike ode to subconscious sexual desire, inspired by a poem from Robert Desnos and starring the iconic Kiki of Montparnasse.


Arabesque (Color, 1975)
John Whitney‘s Arabesque, is considered by many to be the seminal computer film. Set to the music of Manoochelher Sadeghi, and created during a residency at IBM Whitney balanced science with aesthetics as he experimented with the eccentricities of Islamic architecture creating whirling, exotic flows of computer generated images. Arabesque was one of the first computer generated films that married technology and art is a focused, cinematic manner. Working with his early home-made computerized motion-control set-up, Whitney could produce a variety of innovative designs and metamorphoses of text and still images, which proved very successful in advertising and titling of commercial projects. He also did various commercial assignments including the title design for Hitchcock's feature Vertigo (in association with Saul Bass), and the preparation (in association with Charles Eames) of a seven-screen presentation for the Buckminster Fuller Dome in Moscow.


Binary Bit Patterns (Color, 1969) 
The spectacular, fast-paced film features quilt-like tapestries of polyhedral and crystalline figures pulsating and multiplying with a kind of universal logic eliciting a hypnotic, trancelike effect from the viewer. This film echoes a preoccupation with the mandala image and the interest in Eastern meditative philosophy that is seen in the work of the whole Whitney family. Employing computer generated imagery with optically introduced color and flicker effects, Michael Whitney creates a hypnotic, psych-folk audiovisual experience that suggests a secret symbiosis between the digital and the organic as various Persian inflected graphic permutations appear, dissolve and undergo metamorphoses on the screen. With original soundscore.


Lapis (Color, 1965)
This film, by film pioneer James Whitney consists entirely of dot patterns. Like a single mandala moving within itself, the particles surge around each other in constant metamorphosis, a serene ecstasy of what Jung calls "individuation." For 10 minutes, a succession of beautiful designs grows incredibly, ever more intricate and astounding; sometimes the black background itself becomes the pattern, when paths are shunned by the moving dots. A voluptuous raga soundtrack by Ravi Shankar perfectly matches the film's flow, and helped to make LAPIS one of the most accessible "experimental films" ever made. The images were all created with handmade cels, and the rotation of more than one of these cels creates some of the movements. John Whitney Sr. had built a pioneer computerized animation set-up—the prototype for the motion-control systems that later made possible such special effects as the "Star Gate" sequence of 2001. James used that set-up to shoot some of his handmade artwork, since it could ensure accuracy of placement and incremental movement.


Tanka (Color, 1976)
"An extraordinary film."-Melinda Wortz, Art News
Tanka means, literally, a thing rolled up. David LeBrun’s Tanka is brilliantly powered by the insight that Tibetan religious paintings are intended to be perceived in constant movement rather than repose. The film, photographed from Tibetan scroll paintings of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is a cyclical vision of ancient gods and demons, wild revels, raging fires and sea battles with monsters-an animated journey through the image world of the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”.  With an  original score by Ashish Khan (sarod), Buddy Arnold (saxophone, clarinet, flute), Pranesh Khan (tablas) and Francisco Lupica (percussion).


Trance and Dance inBali (B+W,1937-39)
This ground-breaking film was produced by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and records a performance of the Balinese ceremonial kris (dagger) dance-drama, which depicts the never-ending struggle between witch (death-dealing) and dragon (life-protecting), as it was given in the village of Pagoetan in the late 1930s. The dancers experience violent trance seizures, turn their krises against their breasts without injury, and are restored to consciousness with incense and holy water. Narrated by famed anthropologist Margaret Mead against a background of Balinese music. This “ecstatic ethnography” was an extraordinary effort to use film and photography in the field, and the precursor to much of the visual anthropology that has gone on
since then.

Glittering Song (Color, 1965, Vaclav Bedrich)
A beautifully whimsical and visually tantaizing object animation that brings to life discarded shards of broken glass, transforming the dangerous trash into a sparkling magical world of a little boy and his colorful imagination. From Kratky Film Praha. A huge hit at the Czech stop-motion show.


Spacy (Color, 1980-81, Takashi Ito)
His films are like a roller-coaster. His way of throwing the act of seeing into utter confusion is an attack on the eyes in their corporeal function, and to attack the eyes is to take on the body itself as your opponent. The film makes you break out in sweat only by shooting a safe, peaceful gymnasium in the dark-Koharu Kisaragi


Hypnotic avant-garde rarity by Japan’s celebrated avant-garde filmmaker Takashi Ito.  Ito’s stuttering camera wanders throughout a gymnasium and dives into images of various parts of the gym, only to breach the framed threshold and arrive right back where it started. With Spacy, Ito imagines an endless tunnel/loop of accelerated cinema, navigating the very idea of perspective and exploiting its propensity for illusions of both space and time.


Dream of the Wild Horses (Le songe des chevaux sauvages) (Color, 1962)
Directed by Denys Colomb de Daunant with innovative musical score by Jacques Lasri this cinematic poem which uses slow motion and soft focus camera to evoke the wild horses of the Camargue District of France, showing them as they roam on the beach running through walls of fire and water.  A remarkable film.

Felix Hyps the Hippo (1920s)

In this M.J. Winkler presentation, Pat Sullivan's cartoon creation Felix the Cat becomes a self-taught hypnotist and, after a series of adventures, uses his magnetic talent to mesmerize a runaway hippopotamus.



Curator Biography:

Stephen Parr’s programs have explored the erotic underbelly of sex-in-cinema (The Subject is Sex), the offbeat and bizarre (Oddities Beyond Belief), the pervasive effects of propaganda (Historical/Hysterical?) and oddities from his archives (Strange Sinema). He is the director of Oddball Films, a stock film company and the San Francisco Media Archive (www.sfm.org), a non-profit archive that preserves culturally significant films. He is a co-founder of Other Cinema DVD and a member of the Association of Moving Archivists (AMIA) where he is a frequent presenter.



About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.
 


Queer Cinema Rarities- Fri. June 3rd - 8PM

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Oddball Films is kicking off pride month with Queer Cinema Rarities, a program of vintage 16mm films from the 1960's through the 1980's offering a rare glimpse of the lives, dreams, and sexuality of the queer community in a more repressive time. The evening features groundbreaking documentary portraits of QPOC, romantic road trips, lyrical experimental erotica, vintage beefcake shorts, and more. Discover the life of a young black lesbian mother in 1980s New York in the powerful documentary short If She Grows Up Gay (1982). Behind Every Good Man (1966) is a rare and understated portrait of an African American transgender woman shopping, cruising and musing in 1960s Los Angeles. Lloyd Reckord’s narrative short, Dream A40 (1965), one of the first queer films of its kind, is a sensitive and moody film that goes on the road with two men and their feelings of conflict within themselves and society. Experimental luminary Constance Beeson brings us two radical cine-poems on the beauty of love in all its forms including Stamen (1972) with ethereal overlays and superimpositions as two men enjoy a romantic interlude in the woods, and Holding (1970) featuring the sexual and non-sexual affection of two women falling in love. We've got two rare homoerotic Beefcake Shorts (c. 1970) from the beefcake connoisseur Pat Rocco: Fanny's Hill with a bunch of naked men running around a ranch and Amateur Strip with more naked men dancing their hearts out on stage. Plus excerpts from the antiquated news program Homosexual (1964) and local filmmaker Arthur Bressan Jr.'s Forbidden Letters (1976), with more surprises in store for the early birds.  Several prints courtesy of the Jenni Olson Queer Film Archive.


Date: Friday, June 3rd, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 



Featuring:


If She Grows Up Gay (Color, 1982)
A powerful documentary short chronicling the life of a young queer black mother navigating New York City with her child and partner.  She speaks candidly about her life, her dark past, her sexuality and what she hopes for the future of her daughter.  Directed by Karen Sloe Goodman. Print courtesy of the Jenni Olson Queer Film Archive.

Behind Every Good Man… (B+W, 1966)
Decades before Laverne Cox became a household name and before the Stonewall riots that launched the gay rights movement, this documentary short features an African American transgender woman pushing the envelope in a society barely out of the repressive 1950s. This very rare film directed by Nikolai Ursin, then a film student at UCLA records our subject’s meditations on love, gay life in the early 1960s, and gender transgression. The film and its subject avoid period cliches about homosexuality and gender and point to hopeful possibilities. “I’d like to live a happy life, that’s for sure,” she says, and one not only wants her to, but believes that it really could happen.

Dream A40 
(B+W, 1965)
This groundbreaking short film follows two men, one afraid to show his feelings and one eager to.  As they travel down the road in a beautiful car, society watches them. Jamaican born British director, Lloyd Reckord presents a strikingly beautiful and stark tale of homosexuality before it was highly visible in film and media.  His journey from the real to the distorted is languid and almost terrifying.  A brave film that helped shaped the face of queer cinema in its earliest days. Print courtesy of the Jenni Olson Queer Film Archive.


Stamen (Color, 1972)
A lyrical piece of experimental homoerotica by the radical filmmaker Constance Beeson. A beautiful and romantic encounter between two men superimposed with lush imagery of flowers and waterfalls.

Holding (Color, 1970)
Another radical sensual and explicit educational film from Constance Beeson and the MMRC. A romantic and impressionistic interpretation of a lesbian relationship exploring the fantasies of two women falling in love with each other. The two women relate in a variety of sexual and non sexual ways.

Vintage Homoerotica!
These rare beefcake shorts rarely feature any action, just tons of naked men letting their junk hang out while they dress up, strip down and bounce around!

Fanny’s Hill: 
It's an all-male nudist dude ranch! Naked men run around fields of cows, play on swings, roll down grassy hills and have a huge whipped cream pie fight.

Amateur Strip: 
Various men (all nude), dancing in front of a red curtain. Slow-motion shots as they swing their hips and gyrate. Behold the acrobatic stunts, jumping rope, men in a chorus line, taking turns dancing solo. One man even uses another as a wheelbarrow. 



Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Visions of Dystopia - Thurs. June 2nd - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents Visions of Dystopia, an evening of mind-bending 16mm short films - handpicked from the archive -  that transport us into alternate realities; be it the bleak future, or a dark and dangerous fantasy realm. Chris Marker's enduring sci-fi experiment La Jetee (1962) utilizes still images to portray a post-apocalyptic world of time-travel, torture and lost love. Polish director Jan Habarta's dystopian masterpiece No. 00173 (1967) will blow your mind with it's eery depiction of a grim Kraftwerkian factory momentarily brightened by a colorful butterfly. In De Overkant (1966), Belgian filmmaker Herman Wuyts brings us a bleak interpretation of a totalitarian society in which independence equates to death. A windless future society has one man dreaming of flying a kite, a dream that may lead to doom in the Canadian ultra-rarity Return of the Kitemen (1974). Nedeljko Dragić's Oscar-nominated Tup-Tup (1972) is a darkly-comedic animated commentary on the effects of urbanization from the legendary Zagreb animation studio. Plus, Post-Apocalyptic Trailers and early birds will be treated to three alternate versions of The Future (1980) and (spoiler alert!) they're all bad. This imagined future's so dark, you better leave your shades at home.




Date: Thursday, June 2nd, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 

Featuring:

De Overkant (B+W, 1966)
This Belgian short made by Herman Wuyts is a bleak and shocking look at an imaginary, but terrifying totalitarian civilization.  All people are forced to walk along the walls of the street, never looking at each other or the world beyond the walls.  As the hordes shuffle down the street - their hands brushing along the walls but never touching one another - one man dares to run into the middle of the street, where he is promptly gunned down.  As more men give their lives for the freedom of choice, the people attempt an uprising, that is quickly and bloodily dispensed with before the masses run back to the relative safety of acquiescence.

La Jetee (B+W, 1962, 28 min.) 
Chris Marker’s classic avant garde film. Earth lies ruined in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The few surviving humans begin researching time travel, in hopes of sending someone back to the prewar world in search of food, supplies, and hopefully some sort of solution to mankind's imminent demise. The protagonist is a man whose retention of a single, vague childhood memory (that of witnessing a murder on the jetty at Orly airport) is the basis for his being chosen to travel back in time. His journey leads him towards an enigmatic and paradoxical destiny.  The concept was later adapted into Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.


No. 00137 (Color, 1966)
Jan Habarta, prize winner at many festivals for his earlier films, created this brilliant commentary on the dehumanization of life in a technological world. The deceptively simple visual technique is remarkable in its ability to involve the emotions of the viewer without a word of dialogue. Into the cold, dispassionate atmosphere of a factory run by automatons comes a small red butterfly. Attracted by the little creature and concerned for its safety as it [flies?] perilously close to the giant presses, the workers show their first sign of human emotion. Aware that the/[line break] strictly organized environment, we find ourselves caught up in the agonizing suspense of the situation. The final fate of the butterfly [...] yet in no way unexpected, gives enormous impact to the theme of the film. Script, direction, and graphic design by Jan Habarta. Music by Eugeniusz Rudnik. Photography by Henryk Ryszka. Produced by Short Film Studio, Warsaw.

The Return of the Kitemen (Color, 1974)
In a not-too-distant future society, the climate is entirely artificial, allowing for an absence of wind.  One man yearns for the days when he could fly a kite and is determined to show his son the simple pleasure, but in this society, kite-flying is considered self-centered, and is therefore illegal.  When a man (in the craziest future-get-up of the film) sees him playing, he calls the authorities and the man is carted off to an unknown fate. This Canadian ultra rarity is directed by David McNicoll and features some great psychedelic dream sequences.

Tup Tup (Color, 10 mins, 1973)
A short city symphony and free-jazz meditation on man’s seemingly limitless capability for destruction, Nedeljko Dragic’s Tup Tup takes as its inspiration Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” before spinning out in wild, surrealist arcs of improvisation. Produced by master animator Nedeljko Dragic for the highly-acclaimed Croat animation house Zagreb Film, Tup Tup tells the story of a disgruntled man who takes on the world to silence a pesky noise that keeps him from reading the paper.


For the Early Birds:

Future (Color, 1980) 
Future is a juggernaut-like montage of image and audio of three dystopian visions of the future. Never ending technological innovations for those that can afford them, a trashed and ruined environment, nuclear war and nuclear accidents lead to a future that I can’t wait to explore.



Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films 


Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.





Oddball in the Press

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People love to talk about us! From the Huffington Post to the SF Weekly, our massive collection and unique screenings have impressed, baffled, and inspired folks all over the world. Read what they're saying about the country's strangest film archive. 

From the Huffington Post: The Archivist's Dilemma:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-nirenberg/the-archivists-dilemma-qa_b_6273140.html


An Oddball in Youtube's World from Priceonomics:http://priceonomics.com/an-oddball-in-youtubes-world/

A Reel Less Ordinary from the SF Weekly:http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/a-reel-less-ordinary-kat-shuchter-and-the-mysteries-of-oddball-films/Content?oid=2826080

Stephen Parr's Oddball Films from SF360:http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=11485

An Unusual Night at the Movies from KALW
http://kalw.org/post/oddball-film-and-video-creates-unusual-night-movies#stream/0

An Oddball Trove of Celluloid Dreams from Ozy.com:
http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/an-oddball-trove-of-celluloid-dreams/41299


The End of the Reel from The Magazine:
http://the-magazine.org/40/end-of-the-reel#.V1XDJyMrIy4

News from the Archive - Recent Projects

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Oddball Films is proud to announce several of our most recent stock footage projects in film, television, commercials and more.  Highlights include providing research for Jim Jarmusch’s Iggy Pop documentary Gimme Danger, retro-tech for Danny Boyle’s Academy Award nominated Steve Jobs, and offbeat footage for the credits for the acclaimed series Transparent, as well as documentaries like Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures. And wouldn’t you know it?  They came to us when they wanted some 70s smut for The Nice Guys, Ryan Gosling’s latest movie! 


We have recently had the opportunity to work on several fabulous art documentaries, providing nearly 100 year old footage for Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, vintage queer footage for HBO’s controversial Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, and beat generation rarities for Robert Frank: Don’t Blink about the iconic photographer, artist and filmmaker.

For the morbidly minded, we provided trial footage for a new Investigation Discovery show: A Crime to Remember on the infamous Sam Sheppard trial and retrial that set new standards for allowing the media to influence the jury.

We’ve had a great season of revolutionary-minded docs including Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, Emory Douglas: The Art of the Black Panthers, and Agents of Change featuring film clips fromseveral decades worth of civil rights revolutionaries.

On the LGBTQ scene, we’ve contributed rare vintage lesbian footage for the credit sequence for the Golden Globe winning series Transparent, shots of the Stonewall riots and early gay wedding ceremonies for the upcomingFreedom to Marry, and tons of queer historical rarities for Major!, a moving portrait of the remarkable transgender activist Miss Major.

And keep an eye out for our break dancers in the hip hop documentary Unsung: Sugarhill Gang, as well as some spermatozoa in the Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck.

Antiquated Sex Education - Fri. June 10th - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents Antiquated Sex Education, a program of 16mm sex ed shorts from the 1930s-1950s. These now laughable artifacts from "the good old days" feature an adherence to old-fashioned social mores and cringeworthy outdated medical advice while tackling subjects like teenage sex, puberty, stripping, pregnancy and VD. Check your privates, private in the Navy training film The Pick-Up (1944), starring an unlucky schmuck who picks up a nasty case of the clap just in time for his furlough. Mary and Jeff are just two teenagers in love, but parking and heavy petting just might lead to "guilt, frustration" and an unwanted pregnancy in the mental hygiene short How Much Affection (1957). Stay out of the water, choose your packet of sanitary napkins, and rub yourself with cold cream in the very British puberty primer Growing Girls (1951). Dance along with a large-headed and footless cartoon girl as she learns about the physical and mental aspects of her monthly visitor in Di$ney's notorious Story of Menstruation (1945). Plus, syphilitic excerpts of Oddball favorite The Innocent Party (1959), an unbearably unsexy striptease from Mrs. Elaine Barrymore in How to Undress for your Husband (1937), and Your Body During Adolescence (1956) for the early birds. Everything screened on 16mm film from our stock footage archive. 



Date: Friday, June 10th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 



Featuring:


How Much Affection? (B+W, 1957)
Part of the "Your Marriage and Family Living" series along with Oddball favorites "Is This Love?" and "This Charming Couple".  Mary's date Jeff tries to get handsy with her on their date and Mary's got to learn how to stop things from going too far. Mary is at least in her late twenties (though her character's still in high school) and looks a little like Ingrid Bergman. Her wise mother tells her to watch out for the "guilt and frustration" that comes from heavy petting (not bothering to mention STDs and unwanted pregnancies). At the school newspaper meeting everyone's talking about Eileen and Fred who - after getting pregnant -  have had to drop out of school and rush through a shotgun wedding. Mary and Jeff run into Eileen and her baby who has a heap of lies about her new marriage and tons of pent-up jealousies. Will Mary and Jeff decide to go all the way or just end up eating a sandwich instead? An Oddball premiere!


Growing Girls (B+W, 1951)
Mary is 13 and going through a lot of changes in this very prim and proper British puberty short. Drawing on various farm animal analogies (so as not to step into any taboo subjects) we learn all about getting ready to have babies! Watch as Mary schedules her period, unwraps a delightful present of sanitary pads, and as she burns her soiled pads in the fireplace! The narrator has lots of great tips including not swimming, an obsession against "a chill" and even recommends spreading cold cream on her privates!


The Pick-Up (B+W, 1944)
Watch out for loose women at the dance hall, soldier, you might miss your furlough before you ship out!  A WWII army training film on the horrors of venereal disease. Corporal John Green is anxiously awaiting his furlough when he meets a dame he thinks is a "nice girl" until he ends up with with a nasty dose of the clap.  Looks like he'll be heading to the infirmary instead of on vacation!  


The Story of Menstruation (Color, 1945)
A Walt D*sney Production, The Story of Menstruation is an animated short film produced for American schools detailing the menstrual cycle.  Rumored to be the first film with the word “vagina” in it’s screenplay, this vintage gem is both matter of fact and dreamily flowery. A large-headed girl takes you through the dos and don’ts of menses while helpful diagrams guide us all to better understanding.


The Innocent Party (1959, Color, Excerpt)

Oddball's all-time favorite VD film: the guilt-tripped noir-like shocker about a “dirty” girl and her hidden secret- syphilis! A young man goes out on the town with his friend and they park with a couple of loose women.  Later, when he feels something happening downstairs, he's got to face it; he's got the syph.  After a visit to his doctor and some grotesque imagery, he must face the insufferable task of telling his girlfriend - who is already super ashamed at her own deflowering a mere days after his dirty encounter. A cool beatnik-jazz soundtrack highlights this sordid tale produced by the Kansas State Board of Health!

How to Undress in Front of Your Husband (B+W, 1937)
An antiquated exercise in exhibitionism starring Elaine Barrie AKA Mrs. John Barrymore (!) wife of the famed Hollywood legend. No wonder she was his last wife!

For the Early Birds:

Your Body During Adolescence (B+W, 1956)
A mostly animated account of the changing bodies of boys and girls.



Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Classic Cartoon Cavalcade - Thur. June 9th - 8PM

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Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Classic Cartoon Cavalcade, an evening of some of our very favorite classic cartoons hand-picked from the San Francisco Media Archive's massive collection. From the 1930s-1950s, from the silly to the sexy with a little Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies (including works by Robert Clampett, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones), UPA, Terrytoons Fleischer Brothers, Walt Di$ney and imitators, just to name a few. This time around, we've got a triple shot of that beloved stuttering swine: Porky. He visits a house haunted with leprechauns and is transported to a Dali-esque landscape in Chuck Jones'The Wearing of the Grin (1951) and he teams up with Daffy to run a baby factory gone amuck in Bob Clampett's Baby Bottleneck (1946). From the brilliant Tex Avery see the very first Daffy Duck cartoon Porky's Duck Hunt (1937) and see why that "crazy, darn fool duck" bounced and cackled his way into our hearts. Avery also brings us Roy Rogers' early band "Sons of the Pioneers" voice the yodels of the feuding hillbillies of A Feud There Was (1938). Bugs Bunny is up against the heavyweight champ and impersonates the announcer in Rabbit Punch (1948). Merrie Melodies gives us a shot at classic Hollywood with Bogey, Bacall, and one horny wolf in the uncensored version of Bacall to Arms (1946). Foghorn Leghorn gets tricked into marrying the spinster hen Prissy in Of Rice and Hen (1953). Mighty Mouse makes revisionist poetry in a bizarro version of Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus (1944) - this time with a happy ending! The world's most famous mouse joins an all-star extravaganza in the early Di$ney short: Mi©key's Gala Premiere (1933) Plus! Mr. Magoo in Pink and Blue Blues, Betty Boop is a Dancing Fool (1932), Tweety is looking for Room and Bird (1951) and more! It's a night of wit, wackiness and wabbits all screened from 16mm prints.


Date: Thursday, June 9th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 


Featuring:

Mi©key’s Gala Premiere (B+W, 1933, Burt Gillett)

Mi©key and Minnie attend the premiere of the Big Mouse’s new hit cartoon in this animation from the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age. All the stars of the day are at the show, and most of them are ruthlessly lampooned. Get a taste of Hollywood’s lost glamour in this cavalcade of in-jokes and personal attacks.

Mr. Magoo Pink and Blue Blues (Color, 1952, Pete Burness)
Magoo plays babysitter while a bandit is on the loose. After confusing the baby with the dog, the dog with the bandit and the bandit with the baby, Magoo ends up half-wittedly saving the day.

Baby Bottleneck (Color, 1946, Robert Clampett)
Porky and Daffy have got to take over the baby factory after a series of snafus that leave a mother goose with a skunk, a dog with a baby hippo, and a kitten gets delivered to a family of mice.  Can the swine and foul frenemies get to the bottom of the motherly mixups and straighten out some wayward storks?


Wreck of the Hesperus (B+W, 1944, Mannie Davis)
The first official Mighty Mouse cartoon (as he was known as Super Mouse originally). A very strange retelling of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's bleak tale of pride in the face of nature's wrath. A fisherman takes his lovely daughter along on an exhibition into treacherous waters.  When the ship is met with a storm the sailor ties his daughter to the mast to keep her from going overboard.  In Longfellow's version both the father and the daughter drown, only they didn't have Mighty Mouse in Longfellow's day, and sure enough the super powerful rodent is soon on his way to save not only them, but the mice from the ship as well - who have resorted to using donuts as life rafts.  Mighty Mouse pulls the whole ship to safety and they all get a ticker tape parade! 



Bacall To Arms (Color, 1946, Robert Clampett)
Directed by an un-credited Bob Clampett, this uncensored Merrie Melodies release features some great Hollywood star caricatures and an appearance from that lecherous lupine Wolfy who's gots his eyes set on the stunning Lauren Bacall- and a nasty final blackface gag (which hit the cutting room floor in modern times).

The Wearing of the Grin (Color, 1951, Chuck Jones)

Porky gets caught in a storm and ends up staying the night at a haunted hotel run by Leprechauns. Two of the little men suspect the swine of eyeing their golden fortune so they put Porky on trial and sentence him to wear magical green shoes that transport him to a Salvador Daliesque nightmare world.

Rabbit Punch (Color, 1948, Chuck Jones)
Bugs' loud mouth gets him into the boxing ring against the heavyweight champion of the world and he's got to reach deep into his bag of tricks to outwit the meathead.  He steals the announcer's mic and hijacks the PA, dresses up as a popcorn vendor, impersonates a doctor, shoots himself like an arrow out of a bow, gets tied to some train tracks, and ice skates around the rink with greased up paws.


Of Rice and Hen (Color, 1953, Robert McKimson)
Prissy decides to jump off the barn because she can't "get a man" and have chicks.  Foghorn catches her, and she falls in love with him.  He goes about his business of harassing the barnyard dog, who decides to help Prissie "land" Foghorn as a husband since he knows it will annoy Foghorn.  They do it by making Foghorn jealous - the dog dresses as a rooster and pretends to court Prissy, and when Foghorn goes over to fight him, the other hens marvel. Foghorn ends up marrying Prissy, and he seems to regret it instantly.



Porky's Duck Hunt (B+W, 1937, Tex Avery)
It's Daffy Duck's debut! Porky is all ready for his duck hunting expedition, only he wasn't counting on running into "a crazy, darn fool duck" like Daffy.  Of course, his every plan is foiled, and once again returns home empty handed.  This classic features a bevy of hilarious gags including electric eel utilization, hiccuping dogs, bizarre celebrity sightings, a boatful of drunk fish serenading the pond and Porky yelling "This wasn't in the script!"

A Feud there Was (Color, 1938, Tex Avery)
The McCoys and the Weavers are two feuding hillbilly clans. A very early and different version of Elmer Fudd "Peacemaker", attempts to end the fighting; but violence and zaniness win out. Featuring yodels and music by Roy Rogers' cowboy band Sons of the Pioneers (Tumbling Tumbleweeds) for that authentic, down-home sound.

Room and Bird (1951, Color, Friz Freleng)
If Tweety Bird isn't the cutest character in the Looney Tunes universe, we don’t know who is! Owning a pet canary who has a stalker as manic as Sylvester must make apartment hunting rather hard for Granny. She sneaks her yellow friend into the "pet-free" Spinster Arms Hotel and all the usual Freleng chaos ensues. Non-stop chases, a livid house detective and beautifully rendered backgrounds make this a winner.

The Dancing Fool (B+W, 1932, Dave Fleischer)
Bimbo and Koko are sign painters hired to paint the lettering on the window of “Betty Boop’s Dancing School". Inside Betty teaches her friends how to shake their tail feathers to the tune of "Dancing to Save Your Soul." This cartoon provides us with a glimpse of the kind of dancing and outfits that would be banned from Betty’s cartoons only two years later.



Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Cinema Soiree - Ian Sundahl's Boob Tube Shrapnel - Fri. June 17th - 8PM

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Oddball Films welcomes film collector, filmmaker and comic artist Ian Sundahl all the way from Portland for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. From the vaults of Portland, Ian Sundahl comes an insane mash-up of vintage bizarre 16mm television. From TV favorites to things you never knew existed, Sundahl brings a wide variety of the strangest TV had to offer. Come see the most unique and oddball TV films from his collection in a celebration of the old boob tube. Many of the subjects in this show are one of a kind rarities Sundahl has found from a myriad of sources. Highlights of the evening include the soft-rocking kids of Teenage Party (1960s), the original exercise queen in How to Exercise with Debbie Drake (1960), the pool sharkery of Minnesota Fats and Billiards with the Stars (1970s), a bizarre segment of KPTV in the Morning (1960s), bloopers from the short-lived sitcom Busting Loose (1977), an afterschool special with Dana Plato: A Step in Time (1981), and rare promos for the Jeffersons, weirdo trailers, crazy commercials and more tidbits and surprises.  Early birds will be treated to Sundahl's own 3-D short film Ghost Beach (2009).  Everything screened on glorious 16mm film.


Date:
 Friday, June 17th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com



Highlights Include:

-"Teenage Party" a local 60's kinescope danceshow from Virginia; innocent teens rock out to "Kansas City" and more hits of the day along with ads for local businesses, hosted by a young Roy Lamont. This is likely the only the only surviving footage of this time capsule of a show. (PRE-Dance Party USA!)

-Learn "How to Exercise with Debbie Drake" Debbie Drake was the FIRST woman to have a

daily exercise show. She was on the air continuously for 18 years and as an early fitness guru, she was perfect for stay at home wives back in the day. Debbie maintained a great figure and showed it off in a busty, tight fitting outfit. (1960)

-See "Minnesota Fats and Billiards With the Stars" including suave go-getter Bill Cosby chomping

on a cigar! Rare promos for these episodes not only reveal Fat's prowess as a pool player but his great sense of wit and humor. You won't believe all the trick shots legendary Minnesota Fats does like he's not even trying. (1970's)

-In "KPTV in the Morning", see a local Portland host bored with a cosmetics guest for the strange collection of Zanadu products. You can sense her frustration but they both keep their cool in this historic one of a kind kinescope. (1960's)

-In the Shalk Patch Paste commercial (1950's) we see Ray Erlenborn, who first appeared in "Saftey Last!" and later "City Lights" as an uncredited newspaper boy. Ray would go on to do bit parts and voice work through the 1980's. Witness his true screen charisma and cartoonish faces in this outstanding commercial.

-Rare bloopers from the short lived sitcom "Busting Loose". On TV for less than a year, this show

was about a young man "busting loose" from his over-protective parents, getting an apartment on his own. His next door neighbor ends up being an escort and other oddball characters come into his life. This out take reel was made for the in house crew to laugh at during Xmas parties, but every one of the sight gags ends up failing miserably and are offensive to just about everyone. (1970's)

-Move on up to the fun promo clips of "The Jeffersons", the long running show with great character chemistry that is often considered one of the top 50 TV programs ever.

-"A Step in Time" An after school special with "Different Strokes" star Dana Plato (RIP) warning
you not to drink through a lesson in time travel(!) In this early Plato effort she plays the "bad sister" of a young boy. Do you remember those nefarious after school "garage parties"? The boy gets a visit from an interplanetary fellow in a purple suit and reminds you not to give into peer pressure, and remember, there ARE parallel universes! (1981)


-Also included are trailers for movies you won't believe were advertised on tv, an appearance from the caped crusader fighting a tiger, a strange A-1 Steaksauce commercial that has the potential to make a diehard vegan upchuck, the bizarre social psychology of devils & angels -And more!!!

~SPECIAL PRE-SHOW SHORT IN 3-D!~ Sundahl's own "Ghost Beach"(2009) is a travelogue
of the streets and signage of the adult business area of North Beach in San Francisco. The film was shot in 16mm stereoscopic 3-D (Bolex system). Due to the complexities of polarized 3-D presentation, this will be shown in anaglyphic video 3-D. -Free glasses provided! 

About Ian Sundahl:

Guest Curator, filmmaker and comic artist Ian Sundahl has been putting on shows for the past ten years in Oregon & San Francisco and collecting strange films for 25 years. He runs "Repressed Cinema", which, once a month for the past four years has shown offbeat films from his collection at a Portland Theater. Sundahl acted as a Film Researcher and also leased footage for the documentaries "American Stag" (celebrity stags from the past) and "Bettie Page Reveals All" (a one of a kind photo-club shot film of Bettie). In the recent bluray release "3-D Rarities" he contributed a vintage formerly "lost" film from his collection ("This is Bolex Stereo"). Sundahl does not discriminate in gauge of films as he collects and preserves 8, 16 & 35mm -all of which he is able to run at home. At the Oddball show, Sundahl will have available multiple issues of Portland's FREE underground comix newspaper, Vision Quest, and Sundahl's own underground comix and movies he has directed for sale...

BOOB TUBE SHRAPNEL will be shown on glorious 16mm film!

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Strange Sinema 101: Into the Ozone: Hobos, Hitch-Hikers, Gypsies and Road Runners - Thur. June 17th - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly evening of old finds, rare gems and newly discovered films from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints-the largest archive in Northern California, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 101st program of offbeat, ethnographic, experimental and unusual films. Strange Sinema 101: Into the Ozone: Hobos, Hitch-Hikers, Gypsies and Road Runners is a genre-bending 16mm film program exploring global and pop cultural concepts of travel and nomadic life. This program was specifically curated for the Cinema Ephemera: The Festival of Useful Film in Baltimore later this month. This wide-ranging program begins with rare newsreels of a Mexican Migrant Round Up (1953) and Runaway Boys (1953) two fragments foreground our travel program and moves into the surreal Tin Can Tourist (1937), an animated short featuring Farmer Al Falfa and his dog hitting the road in their modern, gadget-loaded trailer home, followed by a trailer for King of the Gypsies (1978), portraying the criminal ways and violent lives of a group of modern day gypsies based in New York City. Next up is Riff Raffy Daffy (1948). Watch policeman Porky Pig roust a homeless Daffy Duck from a city park only to battle it out with him later in a Macy’s store! The Scenemakers (1960) is an unintentionally hilarious long-form commercial presented by Monsanto (!) and J.C. Penneys’. See America in retro style with Jan, Jill and Amy, three swingin’ gals crossing the country, but always making sure to dress their best-early 60s style! Next watch the classic Easy Rider (1969) trailer featuring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda as two stoned-out bikers hitting the road to discover America in this anti- establishment classic. We follow up with the cult black motorcycle gang rock sci-fi musical (phew!) Darktown Strutters (1975) trailer showcasing lots of souped up babes on bikes and dazzling stunts (with music by the legendary Dramatics), while Eric Martin’s mesmerizing experimental USA Film (1977) collapses 4,000 coast-to-coast miles (From Washington DC to San Francisco) into a high-speed 17 minute single-framed opus. The Hitch-Hiker (1953) features a naughty hitch-hiker creating chaos on the roadway when she strips for a ride! More laughs ensue in the hokey, humorous novelty short Brooklyn Goes to Las Vegas (1956) portraying a caustic wandering Brooklynite who spends a night in Sin City, strikes it rich and heads home with a wagonload of cash and women. Exploitation trailers Naughty Stewardesses/Blazing Stewardesses (1974) show us fly girls and their “sexy” side of air travel. We round out our evening’s travels with Polish director Wladyslaw Slesicki’s fascinating Gypsies (1973), a rare non-narrative verité portrait of a nomadic Gypsy caravan traveling through Europe in the early 1970s. Plus! The Tramp (1915) featuring the silent star Charlie Chaplin as a hobo who falls in love with a girl he rescued. Everything screened on 16mm film from our stock footage archive.



Date: Thursday, June 17th, 2016 at 8:00PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or rsvp@oddballfilms.com
Web:www.oddballfilms.blogspot.com



Featuring:




Gypsies (1972, B+W, Dir. Wladyslaw Slesicki)
From Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych, this enthralling non-narrative documentary provides unique insights into the nomadic life of Polish gypsies traveling around Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s.


Migrant Round Up (B+W, 1953) and Runaway Boys (B+W, 1953)
These news reel fragments feature Mexican migrants rounded up at the border and two young runaway boys returning home to a press conference.


Tin Can Tourist (B+W, 1937, Dir. Mannie Davis)
A surreal animated Terrytoon, Farmer Al Falfa and his dog hit the road in their modern, gadget-loaded trailer home. “Riding along with a trailer / Happy as can be, / No rent to pay, no landlords, / No-sir-ee!

King of the Gypsies trailer (Color, 1978, Dir. Frank Peirson)
Portrays the criminal ways and violent lives of a group of modern-day Gypsies based in New York City. Stars Eric Roberts, Sterling Hayden, Shelly Winters, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields and Annette O’Toole
Cinematography by the famed Sven Nykvist.


::TEMP Screenings:Baltimore Screening:Baltimore Stills:image023.pngRiff Raffy Daffy (B+W, 1948, Dir. Arthur Davis)
Here’s a metaphoric toast to the 99 percent. No matter where a homeless Daffy Duck goes to sleep, policeman Porky Pig is there to toss him out. Finally, Porky kicks him out of the city park entirely, and it starts snowing. Daffy decides to take shelter at the closed Macys department store. When Porky catches him, he's determined to be rid of Daffy once and for all.


The Scenemakers (Color, 1960)
An unintentionally hilarious long-form commercial presented by Monsanto(!) and J.C. Penneys.  See America in style with Jan, Jill and Amy, three gals crossing the country, but always making sure to dress their best.  The ladies take a ride on the Delta Queen riverboat in their sporty twinsets.  They tour a plantation in long evening gowns. One meets a gambler with an eye patch and plays blackjack. They change into short cocktail dresses and go to a nightclub in the French Quarter to listen to ragtime and jazz. They take a drive through Pikes Peak National Forest in a convertible and wear cowboy hats. They go to a beach in California, model their bathing suits, then build a bonfire in cable knit sweaters. They drive the convertible to San Francisco and stay at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. They ride a cable car in stylish daytime suits and dresses and go to the Japanese Tea garden, and drive down Lombard St. They fly home in style on an American Airlines jet, undoubtedly to buy more stylish clothes from Penney's.

Easy Rider trailer (Color, 1969, Dir. Peter Fonda
Two stoned out bikers hit the road to discover American in this anti establishment classic. Stars Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson.

Darktown Strutters trailer (Color, 1975, Dir. William Whitney
The cult black motorcycle gang rock scifi musical is action-packed and filled Keystone Cops styled antics with soulful music of the legendary Dramatics.

USA Film (Color, 1977, Dir. Eric Martin)
This experimental film collapses 4,000 coast-to-coast miles (From Washington DC to San Francisco) into a high speed 17 minute single-framed opus incorporating found sound and radio broadcasts creating a jittery, pulsating whirlwind of images.

::TEMP Screenings:Baltimore Screening:Baltimore Stills:HITCH-HIKER.jpg
The Hitch-Hiker (B+W, 1953) 
A naughty hitch-hiker creates chaos on the roadway when she strips for a ride! This lady's no tramp, she's just having car trouble! But this naughty short serves as a reminder that--homeless or not--any one of us might someday be forced to rely on the kindness of strangers....


Brooklyn Goes to Las Vegas (B+W, 1956, Dir. Arthur Cohen)
A caustic Brooklynite spends a night in Sin City, strikes it rich and heads home with a wagonload of cash and women. Featuring remarkable footage of old Las Vegas narrated through the voice of Arthur Cohen - a true Brooklynite. A laugh riot!




Naughty Stewardesses/Blazing Stewardesses trailers (Color, 1974, Dir. Al Adamson
Erotic fly girls-flying high in the sky!


The Tramp (1915, B+W, Dir. Charlie Chaplin)
In this classic silent film Charlie Chaplin portrays a fastidious hobo who falls in love with a girl whom he has rescued from robbers. She takes him home to work on the farm owned by her father. Pathos and comedy are interwoven as Charlie falls in love with her and plans to propose marriage but returns to the road when her fiancé arrives. 


Curator Biography:

Stephen Parr’s programs have explored the erotic underbelly of sex-in-cinema (The Subject is Sex), the offbeat and bizarre (Oddities Beyond Belief), the pervasive effects of propaganda (Historical/Hysterical?) and oddities from his archives (Strange Sinema). He is the director of Oddball Films, a stock film company and the San Francisco Media Archive (www.sfm.org), a non-profit archive that preserves culturally significant films. He is a co-founder of Other Cinema DVD and a member of the Association of Moving Archivists (AMIA) where he is a frequent presenter.



About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. To search through 20,000 clips of eclectic footage, visit our website atoddballfilms.com.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Learn your Lesson from Clowns - A Creepy Shockucation - Fri. June 24th - 8PM

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Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson from Clowns: A Creepy Shockucation, the 39th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month we're tapping into the most disturbing of subject matter yet: creepy creepy clowns! From evangelical clown shorts, to hallucinating clowns, to clown puppets, and even a little pantomime, it's sure to be the celluloid stuff of nightmares! Oddball favorite, Toothache of the Clown (1971) is one bad acid-trip to the dentist when children pull yarn and candy of a clown's rotten molars. In the evangelical Charlie Chaplin rip-off Charlie Churchman and the Clowns (1960s), a proselytizing pastor goes to the carnival in search of new souls and encounters the most terrifying clown in cinema history. And yet, the creepiest puppet award goes to the clown puppet that will turn you invisible to see all your long-suffering parents do for you in the comically-dubbed Parents: Who Needs Them? (1971). In If Mirrors Could Speak (1976), a straight-talking looking glass gets real with a variety of young scofflaws shamed with clown-makeup. Plus, miming segments from the skin-crawling/heartwarming afterschool special Clown White (1981) in which a little deaf boy learns to speak up through the magic of mime and an under-appreciated mime finally finds someone who can stand to be around her! Schoolhouse bullying always goes better with rhyming mimes, as we find in People: Different But Alike (1970).  With more surprises and everything screened on 16mm film from our stock footage archive, it's going to be a night to send in the shockucation!


Date: Friday, June 24th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com



Featuring:

Charlie Churchman and the Clowns (B+W, 1960, Mel White)
A pathetic attempt to make evangelism funny and hip for the kids; Charlie Churchman was a proselytizing ripoff of Charlie Chaplin.  The star of several films, in this installment the circus is in town and Charlie has been tasked with getting a bunch of clowns and carnies to come to church.  Co-starring the most disturbing clown you have ever seen (pictured above and soon to appear in your nightmares). 

Terrific Trips: A Trip In a Hot Air Balloon (Color, 1987)
Yoyo the clown, using only the magic of pantomine to communicate, whisks young viewers aloft in a gigantic hot air balloon. Yoyo and a female balloonist show children how to ready the balloon for flight, explaining each step in the process. Then off they go, floating over houses, streets and tiny people. Accompanied by the music of a lovely original song, this trip gives children a unique bird’s eye view of our everyday world; truly a different way of looking at things. 

Toothache of The Clown (Color, 1971)
Made to assuage children’s fears of the dentist, this film manages to combine nothing but the creepiest elements into one terrifying mind-scratcher. Hallucinating from pain, or laughing gas, this clown has surreal nightmares of children dressed as dental technicians pulling arts and crafts out of the insides of other children dressed as decaying teeth. This is one “trip” to the dentist you won’t want to miss.


Parents: Who Needs Them? (Color, 1971)
One for the schlock history books, this bizarro educational primer features one of the most disturbing and creepy puppets we've ever found within these walls.  Little Jimmy is a careless, sloppy and ungrateful boy who can't see all that his long-suffering parents do for him.  That is, until his disgusting clown puppet comes to life, waves his magic wand over the young boy's face as he sleeps (not creepy at all), and turns little Jimmy invisible until he learns a valuable lesson in gratitude.


The Self-Image Film: If Mirrors Could Speak (Color, 1976)
Don't be a jerk or this magic mirror will turn you into a clown!  A trio of obnoxious youngsters get a taste of the clown life when acting up in class leads to a face full of white makeup from a straight-talking looking glass.

Clown White (Color, 1981, excerpt)
A Canadian made-for-TV movie about a rebellious deaf boy who runs away from a class field trip to explore the exciting world of mimes. After Jason sees a mime in a store window, he takes his first opportunity to stalk the woman, who eventually gives him a lesson in mime and a face full of makeup, and wouldn't you know it, this sad, withdrawn kid finally finds his smile and his voice- through mime!


People: Different But Alike(Color, 1970s)  
Who better than mimes to reenact the pain of being teased? They gracefully highlight their differences while other mimes mock them, their silence broken by a delightfully reassuring soundtrack.

For the Early Birds:

Our Wonderful Senses
 (Color, 1980)
A woman in clown makeup pantomimes our five senses. A series of scenarios follow with children displaying how our senses work. 


Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.





About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Unique New Yorkers: Big Apple Mini-Docs and More - Thurs. June 23rd - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents Unique New Yorkers: Big Apple Mini-Docs, a program of compelling, hilarious, inspiring and absurd character documentaries about some fascinating personalities from the NYC of yesteryear including break-dancers, Barbra Streisand enthusiasts, blues masters, and wild animal lovers with a patented Oddball smattering of vintage New York ephemera. Head out for a beer with a bull in the hilarious and horrifying documentary Manimals (1978), about people who keep exotic pets in their New York City apartments from Oscar-winner Robin Lehman. In I Remember Barbra (1980), Kevin Burns takes to the streets of Brooklyn for ridiculous and revelatory recollections of Barbra Streisand from the many colorful characters of her hometown who all have an opinion and a fond memory (if not a collection of candid snapshots) of the superstar. Harold Becker paints a portrait of mid-60s Harlem and the unsung blues-master Blind Gary Davis (1964), a short, lyrical and moving mini doc. See the construction of some of New York City's iconic architecture in Twenty Four Dollar Island (1927), legendary documentarian Robert Flaherty’s portrait of NYC in the 1920s. Plus, Take the A-Train (1949) with the Delta Rhythm Boys in a rare mid-century Soundie and catch some vintage promotional travel films from the Big Apple, and more ephemeral surprises. Catch the hilarious and super-rare short That's Me (1963) written by and starring a young Alan Arkin. Plus, early birds will get a taste of break-dancing in the Bronx. Everything screened on 16mm film from our stock footage archive (and most unavailable elsewhere).


Date:
Thursday, June 23rd, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com 


Featuring:



Manimals (Color, 1978)
Directed by multi-Oscar winner Robin Lehman, this intriguing personality documentary centers around New York City inhabitants who keep exotic pets.  Alternating between humor and horror, the film explores the people who humanize wild animals, revealing some interesting characters and the semi-wild monkeys, goats, cows and birds that accompany them in their New York apartments and even out on the town.  The film features a cow that goes to the local bar to get a bucket of beer and a woman who dresses her exotic birds in Yankees uniforms.  You can catch a clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8dLIwRZDjs

I Remember Barbra (Color, 1980)
In this marvelous tribute to everyone's favorite hometown gal; filmmaker Kevin Burns takes to the streets, shops, boardwalks, apartment houses and classrooms of Brooklyn to document the Barbra Streisand her friends and neighbors remembered as an adolescent and up and coming performer. No clips of Barbra are used in the film, nor is her music. Instead, the documentary focuses on everyday Brooklynites and their personal recollections of Barbra as a student, a neighbor, a high school sweetheart, and a heroine.  A bizarre and amusing slice of Brooklyn circa 1980. 

Blind Gary Davis (B+W, 1964)
Directed by Harold Becker (who went on to direct The Onion Field and Taps among other films). An inside look into the music and lifestyle of one of music’s lesser-known masters, this short documentary focuses on the great country blues artist and reverend, Blind Gary Davis. Davis first recorded in 1935 and greatly influenced the folk movement of the 1960s. He is featured singing and talking about his career amidst the poverty of his Harlem neighborhood. Intimate and revealing, the film’s rich black and white tones compliment the dark tones and lyrics of Davis’s music. It is a sensitive and moving portrait that succeeds in making both social and personal statements.


Plus! Vintage New York Ephemera:

Take the ‘A’ Train (B+W, 1949)
The Delta Rhythm Boys sing and dance about taking the subway train to happy Harlem and Sugar Hill in this uniquely New York Jazz and Jive Soundie.

New York City! (Color, 1968)
Straight boy meets straight girl in this “Fly the Friendly Skies of United” promo. Our “swingin’ squares” discover the sights and sounds of the Big Apple as they tour the touristy Times Square hot spots. Later they hit a belly dance lounge and end up at the famed club Salvation featuring the 60s garage rock band “The Churls” (with psychedelic backdrops). The evening ends with our two lovebirds heading home on motorbike-to mom!

Twenty Four Dollar Island (1927, B+W)
Legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s portrait of New York City as a living breathing mechanical and industrial overlord, reflecting centuries of human civilization.

That’s Me  (B+W, 1963) 
An off-kilter and hilarious short dealing with a young Puerto Rican man (Alan Arkin) who finds it difficult to adjust to life in New York City, and withdraws to Central Park to spend the time playing his beloved guitar. An interview of the high school dropout by a well meaning social worker brings out the boy’s apathy and his biting commentary on the situation, and the social worker is made aware of some surprising gaps in his own adjustment. The script was improvised by the actors Alan Arkin and Andrew Duncan.

For the Early Birds:

Electric Bøøgie (Color, 1983)

This 1983 documentary by Tana Ross and Freke Vuijst follows four teenagers, two Black and two Puerto Rican, as they break-dance their way through the South Bronx.  These teenagers perform anytime, anywhere transcending the harsh realities of their environment, and dissipating the race barriers in this impromptu troupe. A portrait of break dancing as a vital expression of life in a dehumanizing urban landscape.


Curator’s Biography




Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

America, Fék Yeah! - Good Ol' Fashioned American Propaganda - Fri. July 1st - 8PM

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In honor of the 240th birthday of this country, Oddball Films presents America, F√©k Yeah! - Good Ol' Fashioned American Propaganda, a night of outlandish, hilarious and didactic shorts and cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s calling for a patriotic spirit, shilling war bonds, touting American prosperity, and warning against first The Axis Powers and then the nuclear and Red Scares that followed. During World War II, the whole film industry changed to reflect the times; doing their part to grease the American propaganda machine, demonize the enemy and guilt viewers into patriotism. W@lt Di$ney and company joined in the fight and churned out several propaganda cartoons including two featuring that lovable rascal Don@ld Duck; in the notorious Der Fuehrer's Face (1942), the plucky duck has a surreal and musical nightmare about being a Nazi, and in The New Spirit (1942), he gets guilt tripped by a radio into filing his taxes (for his total yearly earnings of $2501). Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda and more celebrities urge you to buy war bonds while singing and dancing for the troops (with a surreal sequence of pin-ups coming to life) in All-Star Bond Rally (1945).  Can't fight in the war or work in defense? Collect your old junk to be recycled into artillery in Scrap for Victory (1940s). In the dark military training cartoon Private Snafu: The Chow Hound (1944), the lesson is: don't waste food private, that steak dinner was somebody's patriotic husband. John Ford won an Oscar for his short documentary The Battle of Midway (1942). After WWII was over, two new threats emerged: Communism and nuclear annihilation and the film crew over at the Department of Defense was ready to take on the new threats with more over-the-top patriotism. A young Walter Cronkite patronizingly heralds women's efforts on the sidelines of war while simultaneously bashes the commies in The Price of Liberty (c. 1951). See why America is number one in consumption in the capitalist propaganda cartoon Meet King Joe (1951). Atomic scare film Our Cities Must Fight (1951) wants you to stay in the city after the bomb drops; afterall, the nuclear fallout will dissipate in a couple of days. For a musical break, we bring you two patriotic Soundies: pretty girls lose their clothes for Uncle Sam in Take it Off: The Pretty Priorities (1940s) and the bizarro Mrs. Yankee Doodle (1940s). Plus, Vince Collins' psychedelic American freakout 200 (1976) and more surprises.  Everything screened on original 16mm prints from our stock footage archive.



Date: Friday, July 1st, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com


Featuring:

Der Fuehrer's Face (B+W, 1942)
A very different Don@ld short than you've ever seen, in this wartime oddity, Don@ld wakes up as a Nazi. He must wake up early, eat very little and work overtime in a Nazi artillery factory all while german soldiers bark orders at him through a Nazi megaphone. After mere minutes of screwing the tops on artillery shells, he suffers a psychotic break to various refrains of the Spike Jonze titular song. After some psychedelic SS insanity, he's overjoyed to wake up from his terrible dream in good old America again.

The New Spirit (B+W, 1942)
Don@ld Duck is back to tell everyone to file their taxes ("Taxes to defeat the axis!") in this didactic propaganda piece from Di$ney. The first of Di$ney's films to help the war effort in WWII, Donald is guilted into filing his taxes by a very nosey old-time radio and some anthropomorphic pens and ink-blotters.  Apparently, in 1942 Donald Duck only made $2,501 a year.

Private SNAFU: The Chow Hound (B+W, 1944, Frank Tashlin)
A very dark and bizarre chapter in the SNAFU series. Ferdinand the Bull is on his honeymoon with his bovine fair when WWII breaks out. Being the patriotic steer he is, Ferdinand enlists that very day (even before consummating his marriage) and is almost instantly turned into canned food for the soldiers on the front lines. But SNAFU (Situation Normal All F*ed Up) has to do everything the wrong way and he asks for way too much food, throwing plates of Ferdinand's meat into the trash as the ghost of the cow looks on in disgust.  Don't you be a SNAFU too!  The witty Private Snafu series was designed to convey vital information to servicemen who had wildly varying levels of education and literacy skills. Made by the folks who brought you Looney Tunes and written by Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel.

Scrap for Victory! (B+W, 1940s)
Too old for service? Not smart enough to be a nurse? Are you just a dog? You too can help the war effort through salvage.  Make sure you gather your old crap to turn into valuable resources for the boys on the front lines.  Gather those old towels, tires and tin toys. Save your bacon fats for explosives "to make it hot for Hitler". A whole family pitches in and even their golden retriever wants to help defeat the Nazis. A strange reminder of a time when this country recycled for liberty.


Our Cities Must Fight (B+W, 1951)
From the people who brought you Duck and Cover comes this classic scare-propaganda piece that trades on our addiction to urbanism. Thinking of heading for the hills when the bomb drops? Think again. That's tantamount to treason, and in the Army you'd be court-martialed! This film aims to guilt and shame you into sticking around to help defend your hometown and rebuild its infrastructure. And after all, nuclear contamination will dissipate after a day or two. 

All-Star Bond Rally (Michael Audley, B+W, 1945)
In recent years, the nation has proven it can wage war without Bob Hope, but for decades it seemed unthinkable! Here Hope does his best to get Mr. and Mrs. America to invest in freedom at a hundred bucks a pop as he's joined by Frank Sinatra, Betty Grable, Harpo Marx, Bing Crosby and more in this musical propagandatainment spectacular. Hollywood pinups such as wacky Carmen Miranda and luscious Linda Darnell come to life to flirt with shocked servicemen in a saucy montage sequence.

Battle of Midway
(John Ford, 1942, excerpt)
A documentary short directed by John Ford on the aerial and sea battles of the Battle of Midway. Winner of 1943 Oscar for Best Documentary.


Meet King Joe
(Color, 1951)

“Americans own practically all the refrigerators in existence… as we drive about in 72% of the world’s automobiles”
Subtitled “Fun And Facts About America”, this animated, Technicolor propaganda short from MGM demonstrates how Americans are better off than the rest of the world, singling out the Chinese in particular with racist portrayals (America was at war in Korea at the time, often fighting North-allied Chinese forces).

The Price of Liberty (B+W. 1951)
“Liberty is the most expensive commodity in the world today, we have it only because we are willing and able to pay the price for preserving it against communist aggression.”
A young Walter Cronkite hosts this red scare short that's a strange blend of anti-communism and pro-feminism. Cronkite heralds the efforts of women in the ongoing fight for imperialism, er, um liberty, chronicling their service at home and on the battlegrounds as nurses, riveters, homemakers and more nurses! View scores of uniformed ladies marching to a patriotic drumbeat as their faces appear and disappear in the clouds. Because it's ladies that are going to win the war against communism! Brought to you by the Department of Defense.


200(Color, 1975)
Vince Collins' supremely psychedelic animated celebration of our nation’s bicentennial, sponsored by the United States Information Agency.  They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore.  But then again, not as many LSD-inspired animators make it through the grant process. 

Take It Off- The Pretty Priorities (B+W, 1942)
A sexy, patriotic soundie about government priorities. Four girls sing about materials the government needs for the war effort. They strip off parts of their costumes and put them into a barrel marked “V” eventually they go behind screens that show their silhouettes and they take off the rest. Two men come to collect their donations and take the screen too. They're stripping for Uncle Sam!


Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.



About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. To search through over 20,000 clips of our unique footage, check out our website at http://www.oddballfilms.com/.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

The Bradbury Chronicles - Thur. June 30th - 8PM

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Oddball Films present The Bradbury Chronicles, a program of ultra-rare adaptations of the short stories of the literary giant Ray Bradbury from the 1950s-1980s all screened on 16mm film from the archive. Bradbury's vivid imagination created some of the most fantastic of worlds, and chilling of prophecies for our own world and since his passing, science fiction and literature have never been the same. Join our host Fred Astaire in a future world of computerized justice and body swapping in an episode of the Hitchcock-produced series Alcoa Premiere: The Jail (1962), penned by Bradbury himself. The Veldt (1978) gives us the proverbial nuclear family in a fully-automated home with a virtual reality nursery that leads the children of the house to use it for catastrophic ends. Zero Hour (1978) counts down to an alien invasion with the help of a gaggle of creepy children and their interactive board game. Plus, Bradbury talks about his process in an excerpt of Writers on Writing (1965), a condensed version of It Came From Outer Space (1953), and early arrivals will be treated to a feverish episode of Ray Bradbury Theater: The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1988) starring Michael Ironsides as a frantic man mere moments after a murder. Join us as we salute the man, the myth and the machines and characters his mind created. 


Date: Thursday, June 30th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com


Featuring:

Alcoa Premiere: The Jail (B+W, 1962) 
A rare lost TV episode of the short-lived show Alcoa Premiere hosted by Fred Astaire, written by Ray Bradbury, and executive produced by Alfred Hitchcock.
Forty years in the future, the courtroom is mechanized with primitive computers and tape machines, and a week's trial now lasts 3 minutes. The "jury""thinks" onto a punch card which is fed to the "judge," which passes sentence. The defendant only has "the tapes" to explain what happened and the government has decided to do psychological experiments using sick and well people who are forced to exchange bodies. 



Zero Hour (Color, 1978)
A new batch of creepy children from Ray Bradbury.  This adaptation centers around a little girl who is beyond excited to play her new game "Invasion" with her friends.  As she rushes around, gathering supplies, the mother thinks little of it, but as the game continues to count down to zero hour; mom begins to wonder where this invasion is actually coming from and what will happen when the clock stops ticking. This same story was the inspiration for the recent ABC miniseries: The Whispers.




The Veldt (Color, 1978)
A creepy and chillingly adapted short story by Ray Bradbury. Parents George and Lydia live with their two children Peter and Wendy in "The Happylife Home," a fully automatic residence with machines that do everything for them.  The two children are especially taken with the nursery, a room with virtual reality that will recreate anything their brains desire.  The parents begin to worry as the pair spend more and more time in the nursery, which seems to be permanently fixed on African grasslands featuring a pair of lions gruesomely gnawing on bones in the distance.  When George and Lydia decide to move out to the country to get away from their computerized domicile, the children and lions have other ideas. Co-starring a 12-year-old Jason Bateman.

It Came From Outer Space (B+W, 1953)
Catch all the highlights of Jack Arnold’s classic alien invasion film in this short excerpted version. A small desert town gets all stirred up when a mysterious flaming object falls from the sky. Soon, the town’s residents aren’t quite who they were before and we’re left wondering, “When will they be back?” Based on a story by Ray Bradbury and starring: Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake, Joe Sawyer, Russell Johnson, Kathleen Hughes, and more!

For the Early Birds:

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (Color, 1988)
A killer episode of Ray Bradbury Theater starring Michael Ironsides as a man just moments after killing his boss.  He reminisces on the murder as he attempts to erase all evidence of him in the crime scene.  In his frantic state, can he possibly remember all the things he touched while inside the house? 


Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.


About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. To search through over 20,000 clips of our unique footage, check out our website at http://www.oddballfilms.com/.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

What the F(ilm)?! 17: Oddball's Strangest Ladies - Fri. July 8th - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents What the F(ilm)?! 17: Oddball's Strangest Ladies, an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive stock footage collection.  This time around, we're saluting the girls and women that make our archive so strange with a night full of lady wrestlers, derby dolls, psychedelic ice-skaters, little girl ventriloquists, singing and dancing celebrities, tiger burlesque numbers, talking horses and more feminine cine-insanity than you can handle. Get on the ice in a psychedelic skating segment from the bizarre TV-special Here's Peggy Fleming (1968). Take to the skies with a pre-pubescent pilot, Deborah Gubbins in the Popular Person Oddity: Pigtail Pilot (1944). Who you calling a dummy? Visit a teenage ventriloquist in Double-Talk Girl (1944). Debbie Reynolds dances on stage with some crazy big-headed celebrity marionettes in an excerpt of A Date with Debbie (1960). Two fierce fighting dames duke it out for the women's wrestling world championship in Lipstick and Dynamite (1948). Debbie Harry, Carrie Fisher, Gilda Radner and more celebrity babes in their prime explain why American Women Love Creeps (1979). Little Lulu hallucinates a bar full of celebrity babies in the bizarre cartoon The Babysitter (1947). Tragic figure Thelma Todd stars with bff Patsy Kelly in the hilarious Hal Roach crime comedy Hot Money (1935), one of her very last pictures. See historical women through the ages not talk about their menstrual pains in the opening segment of Cramps! (1983). Take a musical break with the cheeky all-girl big band soundie Feed the Kitty (1942). Burlesque cutie Sheree North is feeling feline in her Tiger Dance (1951) and two other novelty striptease numbers. Derby dolls face off in the rink in clips of vintage Roller Derby (1956), plus The Battle of the Burlesque Queens (1948), Femmesploitation Film Trailers (1970s) and more surprises. This compendium of 16mm madness is too strange to be believed and too baffling to be forgotten.


Date:
 Friday, July 8th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com


Featuring:

Lipstick and Dynamite (1949, B+W)
Furious femmes in an all-out she-brawl!  Sensitive portrayal of a premier woman’s sporting event!  Which is it?  Come see and decide for yourself as Mildred Burke (from Los Angeles) and Mae Weston (of Columbus, Ohio) contend for the women's wrestling championship of the world.



Here’s Peggy Fleming (Color, 1968, excerpt) 
This bizarre, quasi-psychedelic holiday TV special has famed Olympic skater Peggy Fleming skating through fantasy sets as a princess, a go-godancer, and Gene Kelly’s best bud. Also, we get to see her ham it up for Kodak home movie film! Olympic skater, Peggy Fleming, holds the distinction of being one ofthe few prominent athletes not to lose her shit after several decades in the public spotlight. But all the ingredients for a Grade-A nutter were in place: when she was 12, her personal coach (and the entire US figure skating team) was killed in a plane crash and by the time she turned 20, she became America’s sweetheart when she won the Olympic gold medal in figure skating.

Roller Derby
 (B+W, 1956 excerpt) 



Episode of the trash tv program features the Chiefs vs the Jolters. Watch the hard-hitting action, audience reation shots and see “Tuffy” hit the penalty box for her excessive roughness. They called this a sport?




Double-Talk Girl (B+W, 1942)

A Universal Pictures “Popular Person Oddity” with Shirley Dinsdale and her right-hand gal, Judy Splinters. There’s nothing more unsettling than ventriloquism. Except for little girls in lace dresses doing ventriloquism. Really, it’s too much. In this wacko newsreel of the bizarre, it’s Lizzy Borden meets Chuckie as we meet a girl who may be the youngest serial killing, doll-loving supernatural psycho ever. Or she’s just good at throwing her voice and has bad taste in hobbies.


Pigtail Pilot (B+W, 1944)
Universal presents another wacky “Popular Person-Oddity.” A 12-year-old girl, Barbara Gubbins pilots a plane alone. Watch as this aspiring Earhart takes off in her tiny bi-plane and soars the skies, doing flips and tricks and even doing her own repairs on the ground. Gubbins was an avid aviatrix from the age of ten and was set to become Britain's first female RAF pilot until her tragic death in a crash along with her instructor at the age of 20 (8 years after this was filmed).




American Women Love Creeps from Mi$ter Mike'$ Mondo V*deo (Color, 1979, excerpt)
Jane Curtin, Margot Kidder, Gilda Radner, Wendie Malick, Teri Garr, Debbie Harry, Carrie Fisher and more all chime in on the things they love about creepy men, like dandruff, impotence, and nose-blowing in this hilarious bit from one of the strangest films ever made.  Conceived by SNL writer Michael O'Donohue as a spoof on 1960's shock documentaries and intended to air on television, it was deemed too over-the-top and offensive by network executives. Eventually released as a short feature film where it became a midnight-movie staple, the origin of this print is a mystery and contains slugs for commercials.  Could this be the original program intended for late night TV in 1979?  

Sheree 3 Dances (B+W. 1951)
Burlesque vintage film featuring the fabulous Sheree North as she shakes her stuff amidst a slew of costume changes.  Watch as she prowls the stage in sexy tiger garb, then shakes and shimmies in an itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikini and finally as she enjoys an Arabian night in an outfit fit for a harem. 

Hot Money (B+W, 1935)
Thelma Todd stars as a Depression-era "blond wisenheimer" who finds herself -- on the day of her eviction -- in possession of fifty grand in stolen money. But to keep it, she must contend with the corpse of the hoodlum who left it with her, a rival mobster who wants the loot back, and a swarm of bumbling policemen who are trying to solve a murder and a theft, and not doing a good job with either. -Bret Wood, TCM

Co-Starring Patsy Kelly, directed by James Horne and produced by Hal Roach. Thelma Todd was a bright comedienne with an explosive career (starring in 120 films in 9 years) and the owner of a successful Hollywood restaurant.  She was found dead in her own garage at the age of 29, and though no one has ever been charged with her murder, mobland whispers continue to this day.


Little Lulu in The Babysitter (Color, 1947)
An extremely bizarre and surreal Little Lulu cartoon- Lulu is taking care of a very naughty baby who won’t stay in his crib. When Lulu hits her head while chasing him, she dreams a visit to the fabled Stork Club night spot- where all the famous Hollywood guests and musicians are babies… a weird one for the ages!





Mae West Meets Mr. Ed
 (B+W, 1964)

The 1960s were a hard time for many of the great stars of the 1930s and 40s.  Joan Crawford made a turn towards schlocky horror, and Mae West headed for the horse stables of Television.  In this bizarre episode of the classic TV program, Mae West sweeps into town and requests that Wilbur redesign her horse stable, with all the luxury fit for a Hollywood Queen.  Ed overhears the conversation and begins to resent his own surroundings, shabby by comparison, but soon realizes pampering isn't what it's all cracked up to be.

A Date With Debbie (B+W, 1960, excerpt)
America’s sweetheart Debbie Reynolds got her very first television special in 1960, Date With Debbie, written by comic legend Carl Reiner. The musical darling sings, dances and even attempts to make you laugh, interspersed with long form commercials from Revlon. In this segment Debbie sings to her pals, well, to giant caricature marionettes of her famous friends like Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. I guess Revlon couldn’t afford all the appearance fees.




Rita Rio - Feed the Kitty (B+W, 1942)
Rita Rio (later known as Dona Drake) and her all girl orchestra tear up the big band stage in this jazzy soundie for the ladies.




Curator’s Biography



Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 250 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.



About Oddball Films


Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. To search through over 20,000 clips of our unique footage, check out our website at http://www.oddballfilms.com/.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.



The Underbelly of the Bay: Dark Secrets of San Francisco - Thur. July 7th - 8PM

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Oddball Films presents The Underbelly of the Bay: Dark Secrets of San Francisco, a program of short films, documentaries, TV programs, and film noirs revealing the dark side of the Bay Area from the devastating quake at the turn of the 20th century up through the dark arts resurgence of the 1970s. From Satanists to cults, murderers to earthquakes, bombings, crooks and more, this is one dark night in the San Francisco of yesteryear. We begin with the trailer for Hitchcock's quintessential San Francisco murder mystery Vertigo (1958). Films also include the classic 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Film with original footage from the turn-of-the-century quake aftermath. Head to the slammer with Parole (1956), a real life, harrowing parole hearing, shot across the bay at San Quentin, in which an anonymous felon fleshes out his perspective before a board of judges, attempting to have them understand what might drive a man to murder, in hope of being granted some leniency on his sentence. In the 60s and 70s, the dark arts made a fashionable return to the world scene and San Francisco was an epicenter for witches and Satanists alike as seen in TheOccult: An Echo from Darkness (1972). Kenneth Anger teams up with Anton LeVay for the psychedelic Satanic symphony Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969) with music by Mick Jagger and shot in SF. The mini-noir Flesh and Leather (1951) is replete with cops, crooks, killings, and a fixed game; and it’s set amid our very own fogbound alleys. Edward G. Robinson stars in an action-packed segment of locally-set noir Hell on Frisco Bay (1955). And finally, a multi-projector romp through the seedy side of San Francisco's own News Outtakes, including an original 1977 news broadcast of Jim Jones and members of the People's Temple after a fire was set at the temple on Geary and San Francisco Bombing (1970) with footage of the notorious SF Police Dept. Park Station bombing, as well as snippets of the investigation into The SLA and more. Everything screened on 16mm film from our massive stock footage collection.



Date: Thursday July 7th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: www.oddballfilms.blogspot.com


Featuring:


Invocation of My Demon Brother (Color, 1969)
In Invocation of My Demon Brother filmmaker Kenneth Anger creates an altered state of consciousness through the use of cinematic and psycho-spiritual magick techniques.
The film is described by notorious avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger as “An assault on the sensorium” features “underworld powers gathering at a midnight mass to shadow forth Lord Lucifer in a gathering of spirits”. Invocation is a quintessential late 1960 freak-out, containing a montage of drug use, pagan rituals, an albino, stock footage of the Vietnam War, the Rolling Stones in concert and abstract imagery all played  back at various speeds. The film is accompanied by a repetitive, droning Moog musical score created by Mick Jagger. In the words of avant-garde film critic P. Adams Sitney “It is Anger's most metaphysical film: here he eschews literal connections, makes images jar against one another, and does not create a center of gravity through which the collage is to be interpreted... the burden of synthesis falls upon the viewer.” Filmed in San Francisco at the Straight Theater in the Haight and the William Westerfield house on Fulton where Anger resided for a brief time. The film stars Anton LeVay, founder of the Church of Satan and Bobby Beausoleil a former member of the Manson family.

1906 San Francisco Earthquake (B+W, 1906, Silent)
Footage of the city in ruins after the 1906 earthquake. Shots of burned, collapsed, smoldering

buildings, remaining walls falling down. St. Patrick’s church destroyed in the Mission. Meals cooked, served, and eaten in the streets, relief workers eating and drinking in front of the wreckage. At the intersection of Market and Powell- wagons, horses, early autos, a very busy street and packed cable cars (fixed or still intact?). Finally a sequence showing refugees on ferryboats shuttled over to Oakland. They didn’t waste any time moving on and rebuilding!


Parole (B+W, 1956)
An actual San Quentin inmate goes before a panel of judges who will decide whether to revise his sentence and grant him eventual parole, or send him back to his lonely life of indefinite confinement.  The camera sits behind the subject, to conceal his identity, but his desperation is unhidden as he attempts to explain the mental state that possessed him and led to his committing the irrevocable act of murdering his wife.  Despite its exploitative framing (the cases are concluded by the rather inappropriate “PAROLE GRANTED” or “PAROLE DENIED” stamp, like in a proto-Judge Judy) the emotional resonance of the film’s contents prevails.

The Occult: An Echo from Darkness (Color, 1972, excerpt)
A documentary on the rise of occult practices and Satan worship amongst the hippie generation, this dark magic doc takes us right to our front doors with a glimpse into the occult stores and ceremonial rituals of San Franciscan Satanists as well as discussions with scholars and hippies alike.


People's Temple San Francisco Footage (B+W, 1960s)
See ultra-rare news footage of San Francisco-era Jim Jones and the People's Temple shortly after their church had been set fire to.  They protest with signs and Jim asserts that they are being persecuted for their fervent beliefs.


Flesh and Leather (B+W, 1951)
The first half of a two-part film titled Pier 23, this tasty little San Francisco pocket-noir has all the right ingredients: the rigged boxing match, the alcoholic professor, the slitheringly sexy femme fatale, the meat-headed/ham-fisted henchman, and, of course, the quick-talking, morally ambiguous, Marlowe-like amateur detective, who finds himself smack in the middle of a frame.  Hugh Beaumont plays our snappy detective, who would go on, only a few years later, to play the far more wholesome father, Ward Cleaver, in TV’s Leave it to Beaver.  Here, however, you’ll get to see him wheelin’-and-dealin’ in the seedy underbelly of our own San Francisco.

Hell On Frisco Bay  (1955, color - excerpt)
No show about San Francisco is complete without a noir featuring the famed Edward G. Robinson, Alan Ladd and Joannne Dru.  A man seeks vengeance after being falsely imprisoned set-up by an unknown enemy.  Set in the city by the bay and featuring every motif known to noir, the opening of this film is sure to revive your sense of intrigue that defines what it is to be literally so close to your dreams yet still fathoms away. 


Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.



About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. To search through over 20,000 clips of our unique footage, check out our website at http://www.oddballfilms.com/.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

Learn your Lesson Plays in Traffic - The Bloody Road to Shockucation - Fri. July 15th - 8PM

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Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson Plays in Traffic: The Bloody Road to Shockucation, the 40th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month we're heading out on the highway to hell with a truckload of gory and kitschy pedestrian and driver safety scare films from the 1930s - 80s including tons of new discoveries from the archive. There will be dolls flying through windshields, little boys in pantaloons, animated drunk driving foibles, an appearance by Raymond Burr, and (of course) blood on the highway! Films include Signal 30 (1959, excerpt), the notorious driver scare film from Dick Wayman and the first to feature footage of real accidents. Industrial film giant Jam Handy and General Motors team up for Safety Patrol (1937) featuring an annoying school crossing guard and his bff, a 65 year-old police sergeant (who lures him underground). Look Alive! (1961) with your host Raymond Burr as we see the POV of a victim of a pedestrian accident. Dad gambled with his life and lost in the melodramatic Technicolor cheesefest Anatomy of an Accident (1962) from Jerry Fairbanks (the man that previously brought us singing bears and harem dogs from the Speaking of Animals series). See a history of drunk drivers through the ages in the short animation A Snort History (1971). A little girl's doll gets the crash-test dummy treatment in the ridiculous Safety Belt for Susie (1962). Boozed up test subjects hit a staged parking lot and tons of ludicrous driving is documented in Alco Beat (1965). And for the early birds, a 24 year-old Scott Baio plays a high school senior with a bright future, but a bad habit of drinking and driving in the CBS Schoolbreak SpecialAll The Kids Do It (1984, directed by Henry "The Fonz" Winkler). So drive on down to Oddball and learn your lesson. Everything screened on 16mm film from our stock footage archive.

Date: Friday, July 15th, 2016 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com


Featuring:


Safety Patrol (B+W, 1937)
"Women are often careless that way"
An early pedestrian safety film from Jam Handy - the masters of the industrial film - and brought to you by General Motors. This corny short was filmed in the center of 1930s auto-production: Detroit. Little Pete, a young boy on the safety patrol (and possessing an adorably thick Detroit accent) goes for a walk with a police sergeant and won't stop yacking about how poorly grownups follow safety rules on the road, even when the police officer lures him to an underground tunnel and buys him a soda. Keep your eyes peeled for little boys in pantaloons!

Signal 30 (Color, 1959, excerpt)
"The sickening, stiff, charred mass that was a man is removed"
The original shockumentary traffic safety film from the king of the highway bloodbath - Richard Wayman.  Wayman's most tame film and his first, this was the precursor to such films as Red Asphalt, and the first to use real life (and death) footage from actual car crashes, not just reenactments. To take a breather from the bloodbath, learn how the Ohio State Highway Patrol trains for their job and learns to deal with a "signal 30" - the code for a highway fatality. Due to the graphic and depressing nature of this film, we will only be screening a portion of the total half hour film.

Look Alive! (B+W, 1961) 
Produced by the US Department of Health Education and Welfare as a Public Service, this oddball traffic safety film places the camera in the eyes of our unseen narrator, a businessman in a hurry to get to an appointment who becomes involved in a vehicular accident. Odd camera angles and a “you-are-there” point of view make this disjointed scare film more creepier than anything else. With an introduction by Raymond (“Perry Mason”) Burr.

Anatomy of an Accident (Color, 1962)
From cheese-master Jerry Fairbanks comes this stylish, melodramatic Technicolor scare film. John, a well-dressed ghost comes home to find his wife selling off all their belongings then relives the tragic events that led to his death in a terrible automobile accident (destroying a beautiful Ford Fairlane). Oh the irony that he was a telephone company driving safety supervisor! Starring veteran actors David Wayne (Andromeda Strain, Adam's Rib) and Phyllis Avery (Ruby Gentry) and directed by LeRoy Prinz.


A Snort History (Color, 1971)
A short, partially animated anti-drunk driving film that details the foibles of men throughout history failing to do things while drunk, from crossing bridges with sabre-toothed tigers to toppling Roman architecture.  A silly cartoon with an important message. Directed by Stan Phillips with animation by Pat Oliphant. 


Safety Belt For Susie (Color, 1962)

A child’s innocent plaything turns into a creepy, almost supernatural entity. Little Nancy Norwood who takes her life-sized doll, Susie, everywhere with her. But when Mr. Norwood ploughs the family car into a tree, poor Susie gets smashed to pieces because she wasn’t wearing a safety belt. There’s lots of crash test footage, with baby dolls flying wildly through windshields and into dashboards, after which the camera lovingly dwells on the severed plastic arms and legs lying on the asphalt. An eerie and effective Driver’s Ed film, shown to unsuspecting kids in the early sixties (when seatbelts were optional equipment in cars).

Alco Beat (Color, 1965)
See what happens when test subjects are loaded up on booze and let loose behind the wheel on a test course! Sponsored by the INdependent Insurance Agents of Northern Nevada for teen drivers.

For the Early Birds:

All The Kids Do It (Color, 1984) 
This time Baio’s a bit too old to be a teenage boozer who misses the diving competition after he wrecks his bitchin’ vintage ride. Directed by Henry “The Fonz” Winkler, All The Kids Do It is above average for a CBS Schoolbreak Special was and the killer soundtrack features The Plimsoles (Lie, Beg, Borrow and Steal) and Peter Gabriel (Shock The Monkey).



Curator’s Biography


Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 250 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.



About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like The Nice Guys and Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Transparent and Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.

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