Exclusive to TFH: Watch a Clip from THE MOVIE ORGY!

Presenting the first ever online snippet of Dante and Davison’s original mind-melting mashup, The Movie Orgy.

Way back before mash-up videos and super edits were the (seemingly) default mode for nascent cinematic obsessives to create a viral internet video, before Everything Is Terrible were crushing hearts by curating our weird culture with their pagan, VHS-fueled media meltdowns and before Edgar Wright was committing his gun fetish to tape or spinning wheels to teach himself editing, Joe Dante and Jon Davison were building a 7-and-a-half hour film* of the weirdest, most insane, most comedically viable bits of everything they could get their hands on.

This became The Movie Orgy.

Edited together (by hand, a feat that seems preposterous and impossible to most of us now), it is, by all accounts, an adrenaline-shocking shot of cinema; a knowing, meta-textual commentary on pop-culture and society; and a smart discursive take on what it means to sit in a darkened theater under the barrage of the pretty flickering lights. So sayeth Dennis Cozzalio of SLIFR:

In The Movie Orgy, Dante and Davison boldly and proudly mash up the sophisticated and the sophomoric. Their slice-and-dice aesthetic is hardly random though; the narrative lines of those sci-fi movies that provide what there is of the Orgy‘s spine are routinely violated by the intercutting of TV commercials, patches of industrial and sex education films and political speeches. Each time the movie lurches back into the “story” of whatever film is being revisited, the surrounding footage more often than not subtly, and sometimes not-so-subtly, provides deranged commentary on what preceded it.

What’s particularly exciting about The Movie Orgy is seeing Dante and Davison discover the comic and satiric possibilities of editing, juxtaposing found footage that draws out inferences and perspectives about the material, and about the burning world outside, that must have been heady and cathartic for the student audiences of the time who gobbled it up. Butted up against clips of Nixon, old footage exposing the casual racism of the time, and a genuinely weird Bufferin ad campaign which crops up throughout the program, one starts to get a time-capsule picture of a world in chaos that might be unexpected if one was anticipating merely a hodgepodge of straight nostalgia for baby-boomers.

But The Movie Orgy also finds Dante and Davison playing with the possibilities of editing in ways that presage their duties as the trailer cutting department for New World Pictures several years later. One bit finds what was originally a long take of a man trying to stuff a tennis racket into a suitcase shattered into fragments, extended and hilariously sandwiched between various clips over a half hour of running time. Each new piece builds upon the knowledge of the previous piece, the harsh cutaways adding an edge of absurdity to a bit of comedy that was droll at best in its original form.

For most of us — those unlucky souls without the access or the opportunity to have attended one of the very few screenings in the last few years — The Movie Orgy has only existed as legend, never to be seen and only to be heard of in the brief eruptions of online chatter that surround a screening.

Until now, that is.

Joe has kindly allowed us — for the first time ever — to put out a snippet from the film.

Here’s Joe:

Those of you who happen to have seen The Movie Orgy know that part (most?) of its appeal is seeing it with an audience and enduring the entire nearly five hours of celluloid silliness.

For LA area fans, watch the schedule at the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie in Hollywood for the announcement of a rare screening this summer.

In the meantime here’s an online snippet to whet your appetite for the brain freezing Real Thing.

Only 54 cents.

*The current version of The Movie Orgy finds the running time cut down to a scant 4-and-a-half hours.

Further Reading:

Movie Trailer Trash on THE MOVIE ORGY

Joe Dante, Your MOVIE ORGY M.C.

DVD Savant Screening Notes Review: THE MOVIE ORGY

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