When Joe Dante’s mashup epic The Movie Orgy first toured the hippie-infested college campuses of 1960s America, it was a mobile party sponsored by Schlitz Beer – more of a “happening” than a movie.  The vibe was much calmer during its recent screening at The Broad, where a half-dozen or so hopeless nerds politely avoided eye contact by scrolling on our phones until the trailers started, then dutifully watched the film in its entirety while stragglers quietly filtered in & out during its sprawling runtime.  Even the length of The Movie Orgy is more sensible than it used to be.  The AGFA scan that’s currently available for public exhibition is “only” 5 hours long, when earlier cuts have been reported to reach the 7-hour mark.  Maybe the world has become too well behaved & socially awkward to ever recreate the raucous atmosphere of The Movie Orgy‘s stoners-at-a-kegger origins from a half-century ago.  More likely, it’s just hard to get a good party going at 2pm on a weekday.

It’s important to note the circumstances of exhibition in this case, because the movie is technically illegal to distribute at any price point higher than Free.  Long before Everything is Terrible! excavated moldy junk media from garage-sale VHS tapes in their own digital-era mashups, Joe Dante (along with fellow Corman alumnus Jon Davison) did the same for discarded strips of 16mm film.  The Movie Orgy is the great American scrapbook: a maniacal clip show stitched together from scraps of cartoons, commercials, newsreels, monster-movie schlock, government propaganda, and other disposable ephemera.  In its boozy college campus run, that ironic collage of American pop culture runoff would’ve invited loud, boisterous mockery from the turned-on/tuned-in/dropped-out audience, like an MST3k prototype for acid freaks.  In its current form, it’s more like digging through a shoebox of decades-old ticket stubs from your grandparents’ teenage years, unearthing evidence of low-budget, low-brow genre trash that’s otherwise been forgotten to time.

In theory, The Movie Orgy is a purely cinematic archive, but in practice it feels more like flipping through TV channels or clicking around the internet.  America’s racism, bloodlust, misogyny, hucksterism, and cheap monster movies are all compounded into one grotesque gestalt.  King Kong’s iconic climb up the Empire State Building shares the same psychic space as an urban attack from the giant turkey-monster of The Giant Claw, a film of much lowlier pedigree.  Richard Nixon, The Beatles, and early, optimistic reports about The Vietnam War are given equal footing as toothpaste ads and a contextless gag featuring a chimpanzee who plays the drums.  The construction of this absurd montage is much cruder than what you’ll find in its modern mashup descendants like The Great Satan or Ask Any Buddy, since there are no digital means to smooth over the abrupt transitions between each individual clip.  You can feel Joe Dante’s presence in the editing room, going mad while physically cutting & pasting everything together as a D.I.Y. outsider art project that got out of hand.

Dante made The Movie Orgy as a cinema-obsessed art school student looking to party.  Years later, Roger Corman hired him to edit trailers for the exact kind of low-budget creature features that The Movie Orgy lovingly mocked, turning that party into a profession.  Like most Corman hires, the job eventually led to Dante directing cheap-o horror pictures himself, to great success within and beyond the Roger Corman Film School.  His comic sensibilities were already well-honed in this early effort, landing huge laughs with runner gags involving a 50-foot-tall woman’s petty romantic jealousies, a bad-boy greaser who doesn’t like to be “crowded”, and a headache medicine for “sensitive people” that each get exponentially funnier the more they repeat over the seemingly infinite runtime.  The Movie Orgy is designed to be amusing for anyone who drifts in & out of attention as they consume & piss out another round of Schlitz Beer, but it’s most comedically rewarding for the long-haul movie nerds who stick with every relentless minute from start to end like it’s an academic research project – likely because Dante is one of us.

-Brandon Ledet