THE MOVIE ORGY storms Manhattan!

Yeah. That’s right. Historical footnote: it’s not the first time!

New Yorkers! Prepare yourselves! Joe Dante’s rarely-screened cult-film collection — really, the first of what are today called supercuts/mashups/trash compactors — The Movie Orgy is coming. Scheduled to open The Museum of Modern Art’s Ninth International Festival of Film Preservation, this event is not to be missed.

Sayeth MoMA:

Who better to kick off MoMA’s annual preservation festival than Dante, creator of some of the best genre-bending movies of the past 40 years, including Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, Explorers, Innerspace, Matinee, Masters of Horror (“The Screwfly Solution” and “Homecoming”), and “It’s a Good Life” from Twilight Zone: The Movie (presented on October 15). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dante and Jon Davison traveled across America screening The Movie Orgy at boozy colleges and grindhouse theaters. Today, the film can be regarded as one of the great artifacts of pop culture, a jaw-dropping extravaganza of Saturday matinee B-movie trailers, commercials, Army training films, sex hygiene films, newscasts, music clips, and Christian kiddie programs that have been stitched together into a demented but sharply political narrative.

Indeed. I won’t play favorites of with biases here: The Movie Orgy is a truly phenomenal, singular, certifiable work of art. If there was ever a more appropriate place for it to screen than MoMA, I don’t know what that’d be. Go get your minds blown, New York!

Again, that is.

As a point of esoteric history, this isn’t the first (nor hopefully the last) screening to The Movie Orgy in New York. Way, way back in an ancient, gilded age — the headier year of 1970 — Joe and Jon Davison brought the show (then just simply billed as “Film Orgy”) to the Fillmore East. Still running at around 6 hours, the show was — back then, at least — run manually, with Jon Davison manning one projector while Joe Dante managed the other, shooting back and forth, trading 16mm jabs like the pair of chuckleheads they were (and are).

Check out a real, era-appropriate report of the event from The New Yorker (!!):

Click to make larger (and slightly more legible)!

The current version of the show is down from that six-and-a-half hour running time to just around four-and-a-half. (Some things don’t survive, alas.) But it’s kind of remarkable how much of what the writer of that piece mentions still exists. I wonder if that writer is still around; I wonder if they’ll make it to MoMA for the return of The Movie Orgy. 

I wonder – if you’re in New York next week (Friday the 14th at 6:30pm) — will you?

[PS. Joe will also be on hand to introduce Roger Corman's overlooked classic, The Intruder and his segment of The Twilight Zone movie. Don't miss that, either.]