The Last Reel with Allan Arkush: Hitchhiking Through Life
Trailers From Hell Guru Allan Arkush’s The Last Reel video essay series hits the open road!
In 1968, Allan was 20 years old and yearning to be his own Jack Kerouac. He and his best friend hitchhiked across the country. This was reckless and ill-advised, but — to paraphrase Steppenwolf — they were looking for adventure and whatever came their way. 58 years later, it makes for a darn good yarn.
Bravo Alan!
In June of ’68 Joe Dante and I graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art Film School. We had been pals for a few years. We also ran the student movie theater for junior and senior year. We had a small budget and showed a film every month. Joe booked important movies. I had become a hippie. Dante was straight. Joe booked the line up as if he was a film professor. I wanted to have fun. By the spring of ’67 I was a hippie. Joe was still straight. A bunch of us film students hung out at Joe’s apartment most nights because he had a projector and a TV. Nobody else had a TV. I came up with an idea to show Disney’s Alice In Wonderland and play Jefferson Airplane’s music over the animation a few times during the screening. It was a hit. Joe came up with a hook to get more people to show up-free popcorn. By senior year we were trying anything. Even showed Corman movies. By that time our buddy Jon Davison was at NYU. We would go up and crash at his 5 story walk up. He was working at Fillmore East. I must have met you at some point. Well, as graduation loomed, we wanted to do something special. We decided to show movies all night long. Joe had all these reels of trailers, cartoons and bits and pieces of films. One of us came up with the idea to put the clips on one projector and a bad movie on the other and inter-cut them. We decided we would take all the chairs out of the screening room and advertise that people should come ready to spend the night-and bring blankets and pillows if they wanted to. I do not remember who came up with the “Movie Orgy” name, but it was a great way to get a big audience.
RFK was killed a day before we graduated. It ruined our celebration. At our farewell party a fight broke out over the Viet Nam War.
Joe left town and moved home to Parsimony. He took acid. He came back to Philly to work as a critic at Film Bulletin Magazine. We were working across the street from each other on Vine Street. I was an asst. editor at NFL Films. He would bring me along for press screenings of new films. The bad ones always out numbered the good ones. Anyway, I enjoy your contributions to TFH very much and hope that we will meet one day.