[bomp] big time: our "Beatnik Beach" film night hits the Egyptian Theater, Friday...

[ItsBoss9@xxxxxxx]

It's been a while since I contacted everyone about a blog or somethin' cool,
but this time, it's for real....
Dig, The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater is letting us do our
"Beatnik Beach Film Night" this Friday night.  We did one last summer at
Sponto
Gallery in Venice, then in December we brought it to the Roxie Theater in San
Francisco.  Now, everybody's been asking us for months to "do this in town"
(Venice is a long haul for most of you), so we're doin' it up right then, and
including a truly great piece of Beat cinema from 1961, "Night Tide" (starring
Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson), plus our slide show of Greater L.A. area Beat
coffeehouses and jazz joints of the late '50s and early '60s, along with two
primordial shorts from the Venice West Cafe  back in the day.
If you've never been to the Egyptian Theater, it was the immediate
predecessor to Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.  When Sid
Grauman
opened it in 1922, it had the same elaborate Hollywood flair (it's gone
through a
nice rennovation in its current incarnation as the American Cinematheque).
This is gonna be a fun night, in the right place, with all the right people,
yeh...  We are working on some special guests; all three filmakers may very
well
be there for Q&A,  at least.  The American Cinematheque's description below
says it better than I can (o.k., I helped write some of it).  Thanks for
plannin', and makin' an evening of it this Friday.  We're gonna have a ball...
--
Domenic Priore
Friday, March 30, 2007: Egyptian Theatre
The Friday, March 30th program is a 7:30 PM screening of NIGHT TIDE, (1961,
84 min.). Director Curtis Harrington's debut indie feature is a masterpiece, a
haunted, poetic hymn to the dark world of the fly-by-night carnival, lonely
midways at dawn and the siren call of eon's-old passion spawned by the devils
of
the deep blue sea. In a fond nod to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's CAT
PEOPLE, at-loose-ends sailor Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper) falls in love with
sideshow mermaid, Mora (Linda Lawson) who may just somehow be related to the
real
thing. Shot in and around Santa Monica and Venice Beach in the beat culture's
heyday, the film continues to exert a strong spell, and is brimming with the
heady atmosphere of bygone coffee houses, poet hipsters, languid jazz and
bongos on the shore. With Luana Anders, Gavin Muir. "b&captures an intangible
quality of what Santa Monica was like in the early 60s. Quite apart from Los
Angeles, it was a quiet residential community. The funfair pier has just the
right
air of seedy despair about it. Everyone seems to be living 'just off' the
mainstream." - Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant Preceded by the shorts: "Venice In
The
Sixties" (15 min.) directed by Leland Auslender. Originally shot for a
television
show and never used, this is essentially a full-color look inside the
atmosphere of the Venice West coffeehouse, its various sections, activities
and
people; "The Beat From Within: Reflections of a Beatnik" (10 min.) Produced by
Ralph Morin and directed by Tom Koester, this short covers a day in the life
of a
Venice beatnik in glorious black 'n' white.
Plus, following the screening, Authors Domenic Priore and Brian Chidester
(Beatsville, Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood,
Dumb
Angel #4: All Summer Long) will present a unique one-hour slide show
documenting the Beat Generation's long stretch over the Greater Los Angeles
area
between 1956 and 1966, via visuals of coffeehouses and jazz joints from the
Sunset
Strip to Malibu, Venice and Newport Beach. Legendary locations only heard
about
in books or in liner notes, from the Gas House and nearby Venice West Cafe,
to the Unicorn and Shelly's Manne-Hole in Hollywood, the Lighthouse and
Insomniac in Hermosa Beach, then all the way down to Cafe Frankenstein (owned,
operated and painted by Burt Shonberg). Arists from John Altoon to Eric "Big
Daddy"
Nord gave these places a colourful splash, as did the wide variety of Folk
singers and poets who performed on their stages.
P.S. Also, a  new Dumb Angel blog is at: _http://dumbangelmag.blogspot.com/_
(http://dumbangelmag.blogspot.com/)



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