Film-maker Daniel Cockburn, in The Invocation (2024)
This year’s festival has a complementary No-Film Programme, considering films that can’t be seen, because they’re lost, withdrawn, fragmentary, never-made or completely imaginary. We commissioned film-maker Daniel Cockburn to produce a pair of video essays considering the Goncharov phenomenon and the vanished, Glasgow-filmed Batgirl.
THE INVOCATION We know what it’s like to procrastinate on a project by surfing the net, letting yourself fall down hyperlink rabbit holes. At least I do. But what do you do when a project requires you to surf the net, when the essential task is to purposely fall down a rabbit hole?
What if you’re making a video essay about the Goncharov phenomenon, that Tumblr thing from a few years back where suddenly everyone started pretending that there was a Scorsese/Garrone movie from 1973 with Robert De Niro and Cybill Shepherd about the Russian Mafia in Naples, and the internet filled with reminiscences and discussions and exegeses on the topic of this movie that never existed, and now if you care to, you can find endless dissection of its themes and enumerations of its motifs and readings of its coded sexual politics, and so if you need to make a video essay about that, the only way forward is down the rabbit hole, so I repeat my question, what do you do?
If doing the job is surfing and losing yourself in the unending chain of not-really-free association, then every moment of attempted productivity feels like it’s actually just procrastination, and you feel that familiar shame and guilt of avoiding work even though you’re actually working – but if you want to escape that feeling, what do you do? Procrastinate and surf the net? What a mess.
The Abjuration (Daniel Cockburn, 2024)
THE ABJURATION also can we pls talk about the word “canon” and what it used to mean vs what it means now and whether the cultures of fandom and corporate IP have a little more influence on our language & thought than would be optimal xthxbai
Daniel Cockburn
The Invocation and The Abjuration can be viewed in our No-Film Programme, which screens on a loop throughout our festival weekend. The Invocation will also screen with our opening night event, Make Good Choices: An Evening of Interactive Cinema, and The Abjuration with our closing night event, Overchoice: The 5-to-1 Game.
Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian moving-image artist based in Glasgow. His work deals with rhythm, language, and thought experiments, drawing on sources spanning video games, literature, power ballads, and sci-fi/fantasy/horror. His 2010 feature film You Are Here has been described as “a new kind of narrative for a new technological era” (Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope), “a major discovery” (Olivier Père, Locarno Film Festival), and “a whatsit” (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). He’s currently working on a live performance about medieval music and a movie adaptation of Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.
In 1993, writer/cinematographer/director Scott King found a beat up 1950s paperback called The Man Who Never Was. It tells the true story of two British agents who procure a dead body, dress it up as an officer, chain a briefcase full of phony invasion plans to its wrist and drop it in the Mediterranean. The Germans found the body and proclaimed the intelligence in the briefcase to be “beyond reproach.” Adolf Hitler himself gave the order to move the troops according to the plans found in the briefcase.
While this may have been the most successful counterintelligence campaign of any war, that’s not the part of the story that interested Mr King. For as the two men executed their plan, they created a complete identity for their body, one so detailed that it included movie tickets, bank passbooks, and, finally, letters, both to and from the dead man.
“I was fascinated by the way these normal guys would unknowingly write these very poignant and emotional letters,” says King, “and by the way that the letters, without the writers meaning to, revealed things about themselves that the book only glosses over.”
Director Scott King with actors Lance Baker and Nick Offerman, on the set of Treasure Island
Mr King spent the next five years mostly on research (while admittedly doing other things), stealing liberally from everything he could find: a 1910 two-volume Psychologis Sexualis, a 1943 Slang Thesaurus, biographies of minor historical figures, ration magazines, 1970s self-help books. Mr King: “I wanted to invent an entire fake novel that the film would be based on, giving the characters and the story a depth that myself and the actors could refer to. For instance, I knew that Samuel (Nick Offerman) was a mathematician and, in an early draft, wrote a scene where he calculated exact change at a grocery store. The scene was pretty boring but the idea of his character rebelling against his bookish self-image in a kind of hyper masculine way did wind up in the movie, even though it wasn’t explicitly in the script.” After the years of noodling, the script itself only took a few months to write.
The five directors of Treasure Island, plus one
When it came time to actually shoot the film, producer Adrienne Gruben sought out people who had made their own films. Script supervisor Robert Byington had previously directed Shameless and Olympia, the latter which opened the 1998 South by Southwest Festival in Austin and closed the 1998 Slamdance Film Festival. Gaffer Philip Glau was the director of Circus Redickuless, a feature documentary about a punk rock circus which has also toured the festival route. Sound man Dante Harper directed The Delicate Art of the Rifle, which was honoured with Best Film at Chicago’s Underground Film Festival. First assistant director Abe Levy was the director of a film called Max 13, while camera operator Jonathan Sanford’s first film, The Big Charade, played a number of festivals, including South by Southwest.
Shortly after principal photography, producer Gruben told IndieWire, “I’ve noticed on films with first time directors that the crew sits around saying, ‘If I were making a movie, I’d do it this way.’ I didn’t want the crew against the director; I wanted some padding, so they’d all have some empathy for Scott in this situation. I hired people who I thought had matching personalities. I hired a bunch of diplomats, basically, who had training in certain departments.”
The crew of Treasure Island
Today, King would tell any first-time film-maker that the only way that they will ever make a halfway decent film is to surround themselves with talented people who really know what they are doing. “As a hopeless control freak, I was amazed at how people who believed in the project were able to stand up and do such an great job that I was unable to hate them for doing so. When it’s all over, there’s a tendency to forget what kind of cooperation it takes to make a film; I’m happy to be the spokesman of Treasure Island, but now that I’ve gone through the actual experience of making it, I have to admit I’m not the author.”
For the look of the film, the team wanted to create a glimpse into the ’40s that we had only suspected before. “A lot of people remember this day as a Life magazine photo,” says Mr King, “especially the one that depicts the sailor kissing a strange woman in the middle of a celebratory street. In reality, the last day of the war turned the country into Dallas when the Cowboys win: a near riot condition, where looting, rapes, random beatings and murder were not uncommon. I was hoping in the film to show what happens underneath the kiss in the photograph.”
Filming the VJ riot in Treasure Island
In order to shift today’s perspective of the 1940s, King wanted the film to look exactly like one that might have been made at the time. Shooting in black and white with a 1936 Mitchell camera and using old fashioned processing techniques, the cast and crew strived to create the feeling that, despite all beliefs to the contrary, people lived their lives pretty much the way they do now.
This attention to the look of the film continues off the set, where King and his production designer, Nathan Marsak, are obsessed with the period depicted in Treasure Island. in their day-to-day lives, they are surrounded by rotary phones and pneumatic tubes, interwar cars and chalk-stripe suits. As producer Gruben puts it. “Their preoccupation with detail and obsession with historical correctness bears no relation to anything ‘retro’, they don’t go swing dancing, they build dirigibles.” This attention to visual perfection creates a real environment where it’s possible, if only for one second, to see that people living 50 years ago swore, did the wrong thing, lived their lives with no hope of ever knowing themselves, and, yes, had sex.
Original Treasure Island trailer
Shooting wrapped in July of 1998, and as the crew finished up the editing, sound and music in November, the film was accepted into the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. This turned out to be an overwhelming experience for everyone involved. Film-maker King: “There are people who go to this festival expecting to see something they can market, commercial movies on a slightly lower budget. Treasure Island was not that kind of film and it made some people very, very angry. But I think a number of folks were happily surprised to be exposed to something, well, provocative. I didn’t enjoy being so vocally criticized, but when you know you’re getting to people, one way or another, it has to feel a little like a success.”
Despite the festival’s reputation for million-dollar napkin deals, Treasure Island was not the kind of film that distributors, even the smaller ones, were looking for. “We had a lot of a distributors who went out of their way to say how much they liked it”, said producer Adrienne Gruben. “I mean, they could have just run away and hid, so I don’t think they were lying. I think it’s the kind of film that works well for people who’ve seen a lot of movies, but there was an unspoken understanding that them liking it and the film making them a ton of money were two totally different things.”
Poster for Treasure Island‘s new 4K restoration, by Beth Morris
After winning a Special Jury prize at Sundance, an award for outstanding artistic achievement at Outfest in Los Angeles, and a IFP Independent Spirit nomination for best first feature (under $500,000)1, Treasure Island continued to screen at more festivals around the country, still unable to secure any kind of distribution deal. After finding theatres in New York and San Francisco who were willing to take a chance on a film without any money behind it, All Day Entertainment head David Kalat happened in on a screening in New York’s Cinema Village. Kalat, who has made a reputation for himself releasing lost classic films like Fritz Lang’s The Eyes of Dr Mabuse and ’70s cult masterpiece Ganja & Hess, has a great affinity for unseen films. “Even though the film takes place in 1945”, says Mr Kalat, “Treasure Island is the first contemporary film I’ve even wanted to put out [on DVD]. It’s not a film for everybody, but for the right audience, it really has the potential to disturb and enlighten.”
Scott King’s 25th anniversary, 4K restoration of Treasure Island premieres at Weird Weekend on Saturday 26/10, with post-screening Q&A. Tickets available here.
It was bested in this category by The Blair Witch Project↩︎
Katy Bolger as Holly, George Kuchar as Martin and Rufus Seder as Edgar, in Screamplay
Screamplay (1984) was the only feature length film I ever made, but it was not at all the first film. I had been making short films for almost 20 years (since I was 12 years old), many of them international award winners (Cannes, Krakow, Ann Arbor).
As a college student, I bounced back and forth between the East and West Coast. First, I was a film student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, where I met and collaborated with other film students. Then, I was a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute in Lost Angeles, where I met actor Ed Greenberg and with whom I co-wrote Screamplay (then titled Death City) in his West Hollywood apartment. “Slasher Pics” were big then, and we wrote it with an eye toward Ed starring as Edgar Allen and with me directing. While we had some nibbles on the script, we had no takers.
The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapić, 1928)
At the AFI, I also had the rare pleasure of catching elderly film theoretician Slavko Vorkapić’s last lectures on the Gestalt theory of filmmaking. Inspired, I returned to Boston and with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, formed the Boston Black and White Movie Company with fellow students from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. We shot, acted in and processed and printed our own black and white reversal 16mm short films ourselves and showed them around town with live musical accompaniment. Many of these films were shot in my 3,200 square foot South End loft, which I converted into a film studio.
After another frustrating visit to Los Angeles, I decided to return to my Boston studio and to raise the money to make Screamplay myself. To raise interest and assemble a cast and crew from my original Boston filmmaking cohorts, I made a 4′ square matte painting of the Welcome Apartments with removable sections, then took a hammer and saw and built the steps and walls to be used in the movie. With these, I was able to demonstrate to my friends how the sets could be swapped around and combined with the matte painting to convincingly convey the impression of a three-story courtyard in Hollywood. With $25,000 raised from friends and family, we prepared to make the movie. Ed Greenberg could not leave LA to participate, so I decided to take the role of Edgar as well as director.
Rufus B Seder as Edgar Allen, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
Artist Cheryl Hirshman stepped in to complete more matte paintings (and the poster for the movie), and animator Flip Johnson, in addition to playing one of the cops, developed additional special effects such as the undulating water in the apartment complex swimming pool (filmed real time through the matte painting – no actual water used), and Nicky’s motorcycle accident (a filmed scale model motorcycle and truck transformed into dozens of 8″ x 10″ black and white photos onto which Flip ink-stippled splatting blood and then re-animated).
L-R: George Cordeiro, Basil Bova and Ted Braun, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
To create the other visual effects, we built a front projection system (a la Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 ape sequence) using a large beam splitter and a lot of 3M retro-reflective material. My father, Gus Seder (who also played Al Weiner in the movie), designed an electro-mechanical “phase lock loop” which synchronized a 16mm movie projector to my 16mm Bolex camera, permitting us to project pre-filmed footage behind the actors. We designed and constructed a special tripod for the Bolex which would keep the nodal point of the lens in one exact spot at all times – essential to keeping the live action set from spatially displacing from the cutout portion of the matte painting when we tilted and panned.
Contemporaneous TV feature, behind the scenes of Screamplay
Underground filmmaker George Kuchar and I had become friends by then, and we flew him in for a month to play the part of Martin, the manager of the Welcome Apartments and the villain of the piece. I’ll never forget the first take we did of him: He was to step out of second floor apartment, glower down (presumably at Edgar) and frown. George did all that, and to top it off, he spat over the railing (right onto our brand-new set). That’s when I knew I had chosen right guy for the role!
Shooting went well until filming of the final fight scene in Edgar’s storage room, when disaster struck. George, approaching me from behind to strangle me, slipped on a garden hose (part of the set), fell and broke his ankle in three places. As he did not have insurance, we raised more funds to cover his $20,000 hospital cost, effectively doubling our budget from $25,000 to $45,000. During his hospitalization, we filmed the fight scene using one of our crew members, filmmaker Ted Braun, as a “stunt double” for George. As soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital, George returned to the set and we propped him upright to film reaction shots to intercut. The final edited fight scene flows smoothly and you can’t tell it’s not George if you don’t know.
Bob White as Lot, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
We first showed Screamplay at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival (sharing the screen with the Coen Brothers’ first feature film Blood Simple. We immediately got interest from New Line Cinema whose Nightmare on Elm Street had just hit big and who wanted to release our film as a midnight movie but only in its original 16mm. When we insisted they blow it up to 35mm for a proper theatrical release, they dropped it.
We also had interest from Troma (who promised to blow it up to 35mm), but chose instead to “world premiere” Screamplay at a local theater in our hometown of Boston, hoping to get good reviews which might entice “classier” distributors. Our strategy backfired when lead Boston Globe film critic at the time, Michael Blowen, panned it roundly. “It is customary for film reviewers to bend over backwards to support independent filmmakers,” he wrote, “But in this case, that contortion is impossible.”
We had no choice but to accept Troma’s offer. The deal – for US distribution only – was that we would start receiving royalties after Troma recouped its cost of blowing up the film to 35mm. Troma never made that money back.
Original Screamplay poster, by Cheryl Hirshman
Internationally, the film enjoyed more success, especially in Germany. It was a hit at the Berlin Film festival, playing to packed midnight crowds. We sold it Bayerischer Rundfunk (German TV) where it was aired as a Halloween special for many years. And I was invited to show the film and serve on a panel with independent filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and Shirley Clarke at the Melkweg Cinema in Amsterdam.
The brutal Boston reviews and the lackluster performance of the film in the US had taken its toll, however. I took it hard, feeling disgraced in my hometown and deserted by some of the friends who had helped me make the film. I ran away back to Los Angeles, where I convinced producer Bill Benenson to pay me to write a script about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. After fourteen drafts and ten years, I had fashioned it to be a 35mm, hand-cranked black and white silent movie to be shown with live orchestral accompaniment. Bill Benenson thought I was crazy and insisted it be in color with sound. We almost got the money to make it from American Playhouse (educational TV), but when they saw me and Bill arguing about this issue, they dropped it like a hot potato.
James M Connor as Nicky Blair, Katy Bolger as Holly in Screamplay
Back in Boston, I regrouped, teaching film at the Museum School and working as a movie projectionist for a number of years. At one point I picked up my old 16mm Bolex, loaded it with film and went out to film something – anything – but could not think of anything interesting to film. I was finished as a film-maker.
After some soul-searching and introspection, I decided to focus on stuff that gave me personal satisfaction, which led to my lifetime career as a world-class public artist/inventor specializing in optically animated murals, books and toys. Anyone interested in knowing more about my “life after Screamplay”, they can watch my half hour video on YouTube, entitled “Magic, Art and Scanimation”.
Rufus B Seder
Our brand-new, 4K preservation of Screamplay, made from Rufus’ own 16mm print, premieres at Weird Weekend on Sunday 27/10/24. Tickets available here.
For those who might not know about Národní filmový archiv, how would you describe its purposes and activities?
Národní filmový archiv is a memory institution dedicated to preserving, protecting, and promoting Czech film heritage. Our main activities include collecting and preserving moving image not just on 35mm film but also contemporary digital movie production, home movies on 8/16mm film, video art and we are just starting with preservation on digital games. We also have a large collection of film-related materials like screenplays, photographs, film documentation, correspondence, etc. We often digitise and digitally restore films from our collection to which we provide access to researchers, distributors and the general public, to promote Czech cinema both domestically and internationally. We also operate a public library with a fairly large catalogue of film-related works.
What was your pathway to working at NFA, did you always know you wanted to work in a film-related field or even in film preservation specifically?
I came to film preservation from an IT background through a film school. Since childhood, I’ve been immersed in computers with a particular interest in computer graphics, a feat that later in early adolescence transformed into me taking interest in VJing, a discipline of live video accompaniment of music. Later, I studied Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) with emphasis on preservation of both film and digital. Before that, I’ve worked in IT for almost 10 years as a Linux system administrator and saw large IT projects rise and fall, sometimes rushing myself into the middle of my night shift to a datacenter to revive a failed storage array. That gave me a pretty good understanding of how the storage of digital data works, and after I graduated, I took the opportunity that NFA was looking for a Head of Digital laboratory, a position which allowed me to combine my digital and film preservation expertise.
Posters for The Murder of Mr Devil‘s new restoration
What does your job as Director of Audiovisual Collections entail?
I oversee the management, preservation, and accessibility of our vast film and video collections. This involves coordinating preservation efforts, making decisions on restoration projects, managing our digital archive, and collaborating with other departments to ensure our collections are properly catalogued and accessible to researchers and the public. I also participate in various projects, such as our current project pixelarchiv.cz which sets itself a task to kickstart digital preservation of Czech digital games.
How does the archive decide what films and materials to prioritise for preservation and/or restoration?
Our prioritisation process for film restoration is guided by a multifaceted approach that weighs several key factors. We carefully consider the historical and cultural significance of each film, recognizing its importance in the context of Czech and global cinema. The physical condition of the material is a critical concern, with priority often given to films at risk of deterioration to prevent permanent loss. We also take into account the rarity or uniqueness of the content, focusing on preserving films that offer irreplaceable historical or artistic value. The potential for public interest or academic research plays a role in our decision-making, as does the availability of resources and technical feasibility for each project. Additionally, we keep an eye on upcoming anniversaries, retrospectives, or other events that might spark renewed interest in particular films, allowing us to align our restoration efforts with these opportunities for increased visibility and appreciation.
Jirina Bohdalová in The Murder of Mr Devil (Ester Krumbachová, 1970)
What are the current challenges you/the archive faces in caring for films within the archive?
Národní filmový archiv faces several significant challenges in our preservation efforts. A primary concern is maintaining optimal storage conditions for our diverse materials, especially as we confront the realities of climate change, which can affect temperature and humidity control in our facilities. We also grapple with the delicate balance between preserving our collections and making them accessible to researchers and the public, as increased handling can potentially compromise the integrity of fragile items. Additionally, we must continually adapt to rapidly evolving digital preservation technologies, which requires ongoing training, investment in new equipment, and the development of new workflows to ensure our digital archives remain accessible and secure in the long term.
What type of collaborations do you undertake with other European archives?
We actively engage in collaborative efforts with other European archives through various channels. Our involvement is particularly strong in key organisations, with our CEO Michal Bregant currently serving as President of the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE), and our active participation in various committees of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). We do undertake joint restoration projects, exemplified by our work on Extase, a film with Czech, Austrian, German, and French versions. This challenging restoration required careful selection of source materials, with our team focusing on the Czech version while Filmarchiv Austria handled the Austrian version. A similar collaborative approach is being applied to our ongoing restoration of the 1929 silent film Erotikon. Beyond these specific projects, we regularly exchange expertise and best practices with our European counterparts, participate in international conferences and workshops, and collaborate on exhibitions and screenings. These partnerships not only enhance our capabilities but also contribute to the broader preservation and promotion of European cinema heritage.
What were the reasons for restoring The Murder of Mr Devil / Vrazda ing. Certa, and what were the practical processes to ensure it was presented in its best version?
We chose to restore The Murder of Mr Devil due to its unique place in Czech cinema history and mainly its artistic merits. The restoration process was comprehensive and meticulous, beginning with a careful inspection and repair of the original film elements. We then proceeded with a 6.5K scan of the original camera negative to create a digital foundation for our work. The digital restoration phase addressed various forms of damage and degradation that had occurred over time. Colour grading was a crucial step, ensuring that the restored version matched the original cinematography as closely as possible. Parallel to the image restoration, we undertook sound restoration from an original sound negative to preserve the film’s sound quality. The process culminated in the creation of new 4K preservation masters and digital copies, safeguarding this important work for future generations and enabling its presentation to modern audiences.
The stars of The Murder of Mr Devil also feature in The Cassandra Cat / Až přijde kocour, which has risen to wider cult status since its restoration in 2021 – has the popularity of The Cassandra Cat impacted the types of films NFA looks to restore – can the presence of a cat influence you – or has it opened up audiences to the broader possibilities of Czech cinema?
The success of The Cassandra Cat has certainly highlighted the international appeal of Czech cinema from this era. While we don’t necessarily prioritise films based on the presence of popular actors or even cats, the renewed interest has encouraged us to look at other films from the same period and creative teams. It has also opened up opportunities to introduce international audiences to a broader range of Czech cinema, helping us showcase the depth and diversity of our film heritage.
All archives have passion projects that maybe won’t be top of the list for restoration or are necessarily going to be commercial hits even with the established international cinephiles or fan groups, so what are those titles for you?
While I can’t speak for everyone at the archive, personally, I’m passionate about preserving and restoring some of our lesser-known experimental avant-garde films from the 1920s and 1930s, e.g. by Alexander Hackenschmied and Jiří Lehovec. These works may not have broad commercial appeal, but I believe they represent important artistic movements and provide insight into the infancy of experimentation in Czech cinema. If everything goes as expected, the films will be digitally restored this year. Additionally, I’m keen on restoring some of our postwar documentary films in the future, as this type of cinema has also been overlooked with respect to returning films back to the big screen.
Is there one common misconception about film preservation or archiving that you would like to dispel?
One common misconception is that once a film is digitised and stored in the digital archive, the preservation work is done. In reality, digital preservation comes with its own set of challenges and ongoing responsibilities. Digital files require constant maintenance, migration to open formats, and careful management to ensure long-term accessibility. Additionally, we still need to preserve the original film materials as they often contain information that current digital technology can’t fully capture, and until it can, it appears we are sentenced to redo the restorations every decade or so. Nevertheless, we care for the film materials not just to maintain a source for the digitization process, but mainly to preserve these original cultural objects for posterity, as in preserving the Sumerian clay tablets which also have been already translated, digitised, rewritten, etc. Reformatting media is an infinite process, thus we always need access to the originals, while they last.
Weird Weekend present the UK premiere of Národní filmový archiv’s new restoration of The Murder of Mr Devilon Friday 26th July, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow.Tickets are available here.
Find out more about Národní filmový archiv’s work at their website here. Visit their shop for discs, books and merch here (we particularly recommend their Cassandra Cat tees).
Jiřina Bohdalová as Ona/She, in The Murder of Mr Devil (Ester Krumbachová, 1970)
Function, allure and even murder. From housewives to manic pixie dream girls, the humble tights (or nylons, pantyhose, hoses – your preference, really1) have enjoyed a cinematic representation any star would envy. One such time capsule of the interwoven nature of nylons on film is Ester Krumbachová’s The Murder of Mr Devil(1970). Despite the implied supernatural elements at play otherwise, The Murder of Mr Devil highlights a gorgeous intersection of practical fashion and seductive personal style. Arguably, Ona’s2 (Jirina Bohdalová) consistent commitment to opaque black tights is born from necessity, as the only window in her flat seems to be consistently open (or have no glass at all?). Choosing to sleep in a fetching mint-coloured negligee paired with thick, black tights suggests a determination to preserve her own subtly opulent style despite the cold.
From Sybil Seely’s thick, black undergarments in One Week (Edward F Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) – an accurate depiction of the era’s necessary, sturdy housewifing attire – to generations of superhero films3, tights continue to tangle with cinema in the spin and drain of culture. Although tights, in various fabrics, forms and fashions, date back to as early as the 16th century, the rising hemlines of the 1920s saw a rise in their popularity – just in time for the new era of modern populist “sound” cinema. Tights, in classic black form, playful patterns and alluring sheer variants, have been captured on film across nations, classes and evolving trends.
The classique black tights, sheer or opaque, as the understated practical foundation or intimately suggestive fashion choice of (predominantly) women’s outfits, is the baseline of tights’ on-screen representation. But to limit their importance to simply practical items would be to omit some of their most interesting uses – and cinematic heritage – as indicators of personal style, identity-obscuring disguises and opportune murder weapons.
Poster for Black Tight Killers (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1966)
Mundanity as style or, perhaps more accurately, style despite mundanity, is exemplified in Ona’s commitment to tights as partners to her vastly varying hemlines, from micro to maxi, throughout The Murder of Mr Devil. Sybil Seely’s mid-calf plaid number paired with black tights in One Week is more plain than Ona’s also predominantly house-bound wardrobe. Tights as an item of allure can transform experiences and actions of mundanity. Ona’s legs in high-slit maxi dresses or full legs out in micro dresses are enhanced, not obfuscated, through the wearing of tights, bringing an intentional sensuality to daily mundane activities. Valérie Kaprisky as Ethel in La Femme Publique (Andrzej Żuławski, 1984) is another gorgeous example. Ethel transforms and traverses French domestic and the urban landscape in draped thigh-split dresses, revealing a suggestive lack of underwear.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, slits, or an explict erotic je ne sais quoi, isn’t necessary to ensure tights wow on screen. In fact, a skirt, or even bottoms, isn’t required at all. Judy Garland, as Jan Falbury, in Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950) delivers one of the most, if not the most, iconic moments for tights in cinema. Wearing a white shirt, black blazer, matching black fedora and only sheer black tights and heels on bottom, Garland belts out Get Happy. The sheer, perfect, tights contrast with the otherwise masculine, structured look without softening it, giving Garland as powerful and impactful a silhouette as the men in full suits alongside her.
Another powerful and impactful on-screen presence of black tights can be seen in the aptly named Black Tight Killers (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1966), with a gang of women utilising the practical nature of tights whilst still being able to cut an imposing shape in their matching leather jackets. A classic black tight, good enough to serve lunch in, good enough to kill in.
Ona’s only departure from classic black tights comes as she sits atop a large bag of raisins, gleeful in her fiendish activities, legs protruding from the thigh-high side splits of her floor-length brown dress. Her tights mirror this unbridled energy, a self-expression of freedom. Cinematic departures from plain tights often embody this type of woman, or girlish, freedom. Although not the first style trend/s to do so, a filmography encapsulating “twee” or, to be era-specific in the terminology, “indie” styles of (often young) women (somewhat leaning into the “manic pixie dream girl” trope) presents impressive and eclectic on-screen tights in varying patterns and colours; the blue tights of Jordana (Yasmin Paige) in Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2011), Eve’s (Emily Browning) black polka dot tights in God Help The Girl (Stuart Murdoch, 2014), Enid’s red tiger-striped tights to match her monochrome red outfit in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) and, of course, Clementine’s (Kate Winslet) remembered/imagined childhood green tights in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).
Indie/twee film tights in their natural home, Tumblr.
Tights as fashion items can convey personal identity but they can also be a useful tool in the obfuscation of identity. Tights4 as disguises for illegal activities, predominantly robberies in various forms, take on the purpose of distorting rather than enhancing personal features. Early examples of this visual shorthand for mischief, malice or both, seen in Plunder Road (Hubert Cornfield, 1957) and Strongroom (Vernon Sewell, 1962), have a rather unsettling quality about them. The tights in these instances create an opaque, smooth plane, devoid of recognisable characteristics, the contours of the faces beneath creating shadows which, in the black and white images, present as sinister, almost non-human.
Perhaps more likely to be recalled when thinking of this visual motif is the use of sheer tights, which do lesss to truly hide one’s identity and more to pull at and rearrange, in funhouse-mirror-style, existing features. Walter Grauman’s Lady in a Cage (1964) leans into this unsettling quality. As a gang terrorises a trapped, well-to-do woman, the uncanny nature of their faces distorted through tights lends further unease to their acts and intentions.
James Caan as Randall, in Lady in a Cage (Walter Grauman, 1964)
This can create comical non-concealment of identity, such as Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona (Ethan Coen, 1987), with his character Hi McDunnough’s unmistakable features shining through. Another Cage pic, Wild At Heart (David Lynch, 1987), again leans towards the sinister in its use of nylons, with Cage’s short-lived partner Bobby Peru’s (Willem Dafoe) grotesque features emphasised by the not-nearly-thick enough barrier between him, his victims and us as the audience5. A special mention must also go to Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1989), whose use of a sheer tight mask from his nose upwards seems to be used solely in aid of enhancing his creepy persona.
From the head of a murderer to their hands, tights can again be transformed, this time into weapons. Fetish content aside (e.g. Silk Stocking Strangler, William Hellfire, 2002), the use of tights as a weapon seems to come from the same place as their most basic use as clothing – practicality, since they are most often in reach as the victim is almost always a woman.Although not always, as highlighted in The Nylon Noose (Rudolf Zehetgruber, 1963), a tail of tights-based murders with far more bizarre, fantastical things happening alongside.
The Nylon Noose (Die Nylonschlinge, Rudolf Zehetgruber, 1963)
The Strangler (Burt Topper, 1964) draws inspiration not from the fantastic but from sadly horrific reality – the series of 13 murders, 1962-64, by a killer nicknamed The Boston Strangler6. Topper manages to reenact, with creative liberties, the real-life details of stockings as murder weapons in a sensualist and somewhat dehumanising manner to the (recently) deceased women, something for which cinema proves adept at unfortunately often. Fatal Pulse (Anthony J Christopher, 1988), a represenative example, draws on this theme of women as disposable items, beginning, in an almost parody of the slasher genre, with a topless blonde-haired woman scrambling from an assailant in her bedroom, only to be undone by her own white lace stockings.
Fatal Pulse (Anthony J Christopher, 1988)
The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) sees the (implied) death of yet another woman, as the robotic duplicate of protagonist Joanna (Katharine Ross) twists tights taut in her hands, having been discovered. In this context, tights act as a tool of distancing from the violence the men of the town are undertaking upon their wives. Tights as tools of violence seem particularly gruesome, the weaponising of an inconspicuous object so closely tied to women’s daily lives, self-expression and sexual allure.
Katharine Ross as “Joanna”, in The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)
Tights hold the ability to express the expected duality of womanhood – the dutiful housewife, whose aesthetics and dress are led by practicality and function, and the whore, dressed only to attract. Ona’s wardrobe and style in The Murder of Mr Devil doesn’t necessarily rest on tights, but they are the often overlooked foundation, a necessary element of life, like food or wooden furniture legs, without which everything becomes unstable.
Megan Mitchell
Weird Weekend present The Murder of Mr Devil on Friday 26th July, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Specific styles and variants which fall into the broad ‘tights’ family have been limited or omitted in this article, including stockings and fishnets (as they relate to showgirls, sex workers, fashion subcultures and women’s sexuality) and footless tights/leggings, as they truly deserve their own attention, and even lengthy articles. ↩︎
Ona is simply “She” in Czech; we’ve retained the original language throughout for the purposes of readability. ↩︎
Iconic Adam West’s Batman (Leslie H Martinson, 1966) may be the go-to mental image for this, and arguably – although pretty thick and more legging-like – Christopher Reeve’s Superman (1978-1983). ↩︎
NB this could arguably fall exclusively under “stockings”. However, inclusion is permitted with the understanding that identification of tights vs stockings, post-robbery modification – i.e. if tights have been cut to allow for ease of use – would be difficult. ↩︎
Coincidentally, Frederick Elmes noted his somewhat experimental use of tights stretched across the camera’s lens to create a subtle, dream-like effect for Wild At Heart during a post-screening Q&A at NYC’s Metrograph, April 13th 2024. ↩︎
Other filmic adaptations of this crime include The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968) and Boston Strangler (Matt Ruskin, 2023). ↩︎
When you read Divinity director Eddie Alcazar saying, “There is no script for this film,”1 for most armchair experts, that’s a big, flapping red flag. According to DC Studios CEO James Gunn, shooting with unfinished scripts is “the number one reason for the deteriorating quality of feature films.” Since taking on his new role, Gunn’s vowed not to green light a film until it has a finished script. Hollywood’s endemic lack of respect for screenplays (and their creators) is so notorious, though, that the mission statement is news, rather than the insight. Akira Kurosawa is oft-quoted in the same vein:
“With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.”
Of course, even the best scripts are far from sacrosanct. Film-makers often need to rip them up due to budget or scheduling constraints, unforeseen challenges with locations, or any other random adversities that impinge on production. Planned reshoots are standard stages in a big-budget film’s schedule and “we’ll fix it in post” a well-worn cliché. Even if all of those words make it to the edit suite as intended, whole pages, sequences, storylines can ultimately be stripped out, needs must.
Of his own accord, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn (Emerald F’nell, 2023)
Some of the most famous moments in popular cinema were unscripted or unplanned too, from now-notorious episodes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) and Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023) to iconic lines like, “I’m walkin’ here!”, “Here’s Johnny!” and “Here’s looking at you, kid.”2 Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s screenplay for The Blair Witch Project (1999) was only 35 pages along and the dialogue intended to be entirely improvised, an approach which later influenced the production of Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010). Christopher Guest’s mockumentary ouevre showcases largely improvised dialogue, from Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984), through his own Waiting For Guffman (1996) to Mascots (2016). And then there’s the improv-heavy, “line-o-rama” approach, proven and popularised by writer/producer/director Judd Apatow, where performers are given free rein in front of the camera to riff on and develop what’s on the page.
Closest to Divinity, in some ways, is Coherence, James Ward Byrkit’s well-received 2o13 sci-fi thriller, carefully planned but filmed without a script and with an improvising cast. Byrkit has explained:
Instead of a script I had my own 12-page treatment that I spent about a year working on. It outlined all of the twists and reveals, and character arcs and pieces of the puzzle that needed to happen scene-by-scene. But each day, instead of getting a script, the actors would get a page of notes for their individual character, whether it was a backstory or information about their motivations… The goal was to get them listening to each other, and engaged in the mystery of it all.3
Poster for Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), by G. Dedieu
Other film-makers make a virtue of sparse or non-existent scripts, from page to screen. Screenplays are evidently much more than dialogue but, in those terms alone, there are films which are purposefully laconic. JC Chandor’s All Is Lost (2013) contains only 195 words in all its 106 minutes, and only 154 of those words for solo star Robert Redford.4 Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat (1983) contains only two. Not to entirely gloss over generations of silent movies (and their later tributes and homages), but there are many modern films that prioritise visual storytelling without aping young cinema. There are a number of films that indulge in sublingual dialogue, like Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), Steve Oram’s Aaaaaaaah! (2015), Sasquatch Sunset (David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, 2024) or the gibberish stylings of Nude Tuesday (Armağan Ballantyne, 2022). There are more generally meditative works, works of slow cinema and, of course, the haiku-like screenplay for Walter Hill’s The Driver, “the purest I ever wrote”.
Excerpts from Walter Hill’s script for The Driver (1978)
However, the received wisdom is that to start production without a full script (consensus seems to be somewhere around 20-25,000 words, though they tend to be measured in pages, roughly one per-screen-minute) is to court certain disaster. Many notable box office successes with a reportedly slipshod approach to pre-preparedness – e.g. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008)5, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)6, Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)7 – contradict that, though. And recently, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie method for developing the Mission: Impossible films has flipped the concept on its head, purposefully devising, developing and even shooting the action set-pieces before a narrative framework has been decided in order to make sense of them.8
For Alcazar, though, shooting without a full script is simply a different mode of film-making, hewing more closely to his voluminous storyboards and informed by the stop-start nature of his production, principle photography stretching to a year, “over the course of seven different shoots.” As he describes:
I shot a bit, edited for two or three months, then shot again, because I wasn’t really confined by a script. I had my storyboards, but I wanted to leave it open for new and fresh ideas.My biggest goal is try to figure out a way to make films that don’t deny any creative ideas. It just sucks when you’re like, “Damn, I should have done this.”9
Actors, inevitably, had to sign on without even the promise of a standard blueprint. Lead actor Stephen Dorff was given just 30-40 pages of a script for Divinity, from which he then observed Alcazar “embellishing the idea”1. For Bella Thorne, in the admittedly much smaller role of Ziva, there was no script at all. Noting Divinity was also shot on film11, Dorff concluded, “[Alcazar] basically took some of the most challenging things and decided to make a movie with all of them. But that is what makes Eddie Eddie, and what makes this film dynamic and exciting.”
We’re used to hearing about how central storyboards and pre-vis are to modern film-making, especially fantastic or genre cinema, so perhaps it’s easy to imagine a tightly-visualised production where the action is locked down and the dialogue either spontaneous or superfluous, depending where we find ourselves on the spectrum of Alcazar’s “fresh ideas”. According to Divinity cinematographer and frequent Alcazar collaborator Danny Hiele, though, that’s not quite the case:
We did have storyboards, but they serve more as a general reference rather than a shot-for-shot blueprint. When the actors are on set and run through a scene, that’s when things really take shape. The storyboard informs us of basic needs like close-ups or wide shots. In essence, it’s like free jazz: we have a team and a general theme, and we improvise within that framework without going off on a tangent.
A key way that Divinity differs from Coherence, say, is that it was funded entirely, albeit modestly, by Steven Soderbergh, with no conditions. The results, inevitably, speak for themselves, but one through line in the praise and criticism of Divinity is the conclusion (or perhaps concession?) that it’s “best understood as a vibe”12, in the broader grand tradition of midnight movies – it needs to be experienced, among people, not read like a book – though perhaps that’s an easy shrug to “style-over-substance” criticism.
One thing we can assume, for better or worse, is that Divinity is exactly the film Alcazar (whose background is in VFX and 3D animation) wanted to make, whether he knew it or not. Curiously, though, for such an evidently auteurish approach, one of Alcazar’s drivers is the desire to cede control. Eschewing a more traditional script was a deliberate step towards that:
In visual effects, you do have full control over everything. You’re literally working in a 3D space where every character is a puppet. You move them frame by frame and you look at every detail. The reason I got into filmmaking was just so I don’t have to do all that stuff. With characters especially, I want to be surprised. I want people to surprise me with their performances, or whatever area they’re in while we create the film.13
So, no-script film-making is not new, nor is it necessarily out-of-fashion, but it’s still rare to intentionally barrel into principal photography with no script and no intention to write one. In this regard, the teachings of Scott Shaw, author, actor, filmmaker, composer, artist, journalist, photographer, blogger, erstwhile martial artist and proponent of Zen Filmmaking14, are instructive. In his own words:
The impetus for the birth of Zen Filmmaking occurred after the first weekend of production on The Roller Blade Seven. [Director Donald G Jackson] and I were very disappointed with the performances of the massive cast we had hired to take part in the film. We looked at each other and realized that the majority of them did not have the talent to truly pull-off the roll of the character they had been assigned. With this, we came to a realization to just go out and film the movie, not expect anything from our cast and crew, and make up the story as we went along. After a few days of this style of production, I had a realization, based in my lifelong involvement with eastern mysticism. I looked at Don and said, “This is Zen. This is Zen Filmmaking.” And, that was it.
Poster for Legend of the Roller Blade Seven (Donald G Jackson, 1992)
The foundation of Zen Filmmaking, and the guiding principle of each of the 161 films Shaw has directed since his first solo Zen Film, Samurai Vampire Bikers From Hell (1992), is…no foundation. More practically, no screenplay, as Shaw explains:
First of all, and perhaps most importantly, from a philosophic perspective, screenplays keep you locked into a stagnate mindset. If your film is created around a screenplay, then your cast and crew are very reluctant to allow things to change. But, if you go into a project with simply an overview of a story idea, then your project becomes free and new inspiration is allowed to occur at any moment. And, believe me, from someone who has made a lot of films, you never know what new inspiration will strike or what great unexpected situation will present itself when you get to your location, have your cast in place, and are open minded about what you will actually film.
The other reason to not use a screenplay is based upon the fact that in your mind’s eye you can write a great story, have it set in elaborate locations, and acted out by great actors. For anyone who has ever been on a low-budget movie set, you quickly see that this is not the case. So, what occurs by writing an elaborate screenplay is that you are only setting yourself up for disappointment. But, with no screenplay, you are free. Any production is allowed to happen as it happens and become what it becomes.
Shaw has developed six tenets of Zen Filmmaking which guide and shape his practice and that you can explore at his website, here. “If you acutely plan your productions, with screenplays, storyboards, and locations,” he argues, “there is no room for the instantaneousness of Cinematic Enlightenment to occur.” He concludes, “In Zen Filmmaking, nothing is desired and, thus, all outcomes are perfect.”
Sean Welsh
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Eddie Alcazar, as told to Constanza Falco Raez, flaunt.com↩︎
Casablanca famously commenced shooting with only half a script; the equally famous “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” was dubbed by Bogart a month after filming concluded. ↩︎
James Ward Byrkit, “How Gotham Nominee James Ward Byrkit Made ‘Coherence’ in 5 Days with No Script or Budget”, Indiewire↩︎
Ref star Jeff Bridges, “They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?'” (as reported by Gizmodo) ↩︎
Ref screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, “It was not at all locked in. We had enough to start shooting the first ten days. I was writing frantically ahead of schedule… If I wasn’t on call as an actor that day I was holed up in the cabin writing the rest of the movie.” (Money Into Light) ↩︎
Ref star Russell Crowe, “It had 21 pages when we started shooting…it’s the dumbest possible way to make a film.” (BBC Radio 1) ↩︎
Ref Writer/Director Christopher McQuarrie, “There’s that little GIF of Wallace And Gromit, and Gromit is putting the track in front of the train. That’s very much what making Mission: Impossible is.” (Empire Magazine) ↩︎
It’s about life, death, and rebirth – those are the main themes that surround it. It’s about a character named Jaxxon (Stephen Dorff), who ends up creating a chemical called Divinity. It enables people to become pretty much immortal, at least physically immortal. But it’s a work-in- progress, the mind aspect hasn’t been fully figured out, so minds are deteriorating the same as normal, but everyone is physically in their prime. Another side-effect is that you can’t reproduce when you’re taking the chemical, so people taking it must choose… either to live forever or give life.
Can you talk about the themes within the film?
I guess everybody has their own interpretation of the afterlife, what life and rebirth is. Mainly, I use these themes for people to think and ask questions about them, and kind of just dive into them deeper; not necessarily answering how it should be. It was mainly to pose these questions.
Can you talk about the sibling brother relationships in the film?
Between Moises and Jason – They’re star children, these brothers that were made from stardust, and they have one sole purpose. I don’t know if this is revealing too much, but pretty much they were created to maintain balance in the universe. They are sent to this planet where they sense something that is causing a disturbance, which is Divinity. They’re there to save the planet so it doesn’t self-destruct.
How did this amazing cast come together? Have you worked with any of the talent previously?
I like working with new talent to see where their instincts lie. We had a basic treatment and then we used storyboards. So, I put all these on a wall and then I brought these actors in that I admired, and that I thought fit well with the project, and then I kind of went through the whole entire film with them on the wall. So, they pretty much got a firsthand look at the film, not necessarily what you interpret from words but literal drawings of how the shot is angled and everything, from these storyboards. That created a conversation, and they were either down for it or not, but pretty much everyone that I wanted I was able to get for it, and they were excited to try something different.
Karrueche Tran as Nikita in Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)
What was the biggest challenge making the film?
Resources are always tricky. And I think, when you’re creating something like this film, which I feel hasn’t been done, we’re all kind of coming together to explore a new way of creating films, but also how we tell them. I think we were ready for it and we knew it was going to be challenging. It’s tough obviously when you don’t have a lot of money or resources to make things easier with time or added manpower. All we had was kind of persistence with people that were able to still see the end to the finish line and do whatever possible to get it there.
Was there a particular scene that stands out in your mind when you were shooting the film?
Not anything in particular. I mean, everything was just kind of equally nuts, but I think overall the creature transformation that Dorff goes through was pretty unique and different, and challenging at the same time.
Stephen Dorff as Jaxxon in Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)
Can you talk about the decision to shoot the film in black and white?
The last couple films I did, at least in short form, were also in the same aesthetic and I wanted to explore it in the longer form – wanted to see if it would hold up. I wanted to utilise all the stuff I learned with my shorts into something bigger. I’ve only heard of a couple of films that have ever been shot on our specific format – the black and white reversal, it’s kind of a unique stock that Kodak had to make specifically for us.
How did Steven Soderbergh become involved with the film? Was there any great advice he gave you during the production?
He was executive producer on my last film Perfect and from there our relationship grew and one day we were talking, and he just offered to fund my next idea. It was really just as simple as that. He didn’t really ask what it was about or anything specific, it’s just this amount of money and I can do just whatever with it, which was pretty amazing but also that’s a lot of pressure on your shoulders, to make sure it gets the money back and it makes him happy creatively. I always text him here and there about specific little things but as far as creativity I think he wants me to find it on my own, he doesn’t really influence any of that.
How did DJ Muggs get involved with the project?
So, there are two composers, DJ Muggs and Dean Hurley. Dean had worked with him on one of his albums before and he put me in touch with him, and we met. This is the first time DJ Muggs is really scoring a film, so he was really excited. I showed him some of the footage and it just seemed like it was just a perfect fit for him to explore some of these ideas and work with Dean again. I’ve been a big fan of his since I was a kid.
Thanks to Utopia
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Adam Torel is the founder and one-man-band leader of Third Window Films, established in 2005 with the express intention of broadening the canon / taste / market for Asian cinema in the UK, beyond the J-Horror boom of the late ’90s and early noughts.When we were trying to source a screening licence for Sogo Ishii’s The Crazy Family for WWI, back in 2018, Adam was one of the first trees we shook for a lead. Now, the film is finally getting a UK disc release, part of Third Window’s Director’s Company series, and we jumped at the chance to screen it again, in a brand-new restoration, for its 40th anniversary. We spoke to Adam about the origins of Third Window and the work behind a release like The Crazy Family.
We started discussing last month’s screening, Kim’s Video, and how regional institutions, like the Florida video store where Adam cut his teeth, are comparatively unsung and undervalued.Adam had seen Kim’s Video while sitting on a film festival jury.
[WW] One of the through-lines for our monthly series is curation and the people who build collections and shape other people’s collections – arbiters of taste, I suppose, would be one way of saying it. Really, it’s about way-finders, as opposed to gatekeepers, and curating the canon in that sense.
[Adam] When I worked at the video shop, I was like that. I was really into independent films, and I lived in a small town in Florida. There was nothing there, but there was this amazing video shop that I ended up working at. I was always into film, but it was there I got into, you know, hardcore, like, super-rare films. And that video shop, the owners just basically bought every single VHS that was ever released, whether they liked it or not. They just thought, “We need to buy everything and keep it in the shop,” you know, to keep these films alive. And they never threw anything away. So, as films would lose their licenses or they would become out of print, copies still existed in this shop.
The owner of the shop made his money through real-estate, but his passion was cinema, this tiny shop in Florida that nobody ever really came to, but you’d have, like, 50,000 films. They’d been buying VHS since the format started, so there were all these films that you could never find anywhere, ever. And this was obviously before the internet as well, so if you wanted to find out about something, you would go to the shop, and these two – this owner and this manager – they basically had an encyclopedic memory in their brain. You’d come in, or a customer would come in, “Yeah, I remember this movie when I was, like, 15 and, like, this cat died,” and they’d just, boom, they’d know exactly what it was, who directed it, who the cameraman was. It was an unbelievable experience. Actually, I wasn’t old enough to work there, but I managed to convince them to let me work there when I was 16. And I worked there for four years, just watching movies in the shop, day and night, and then taking stuff home and watching it till the morning. I couldn’t sleep very well at the time, so I’d be watching all day and night.
I got into Asian cinema because it was the films that you couldn’t see, even though they had everything. I was always trying to find the films that were just impossible to find. At the time, [Asian films were] really hard to see overseas, so I was, like, “All right, I’m going to get into Asian films and do all these trades with Video Search of Miami and all these places.” They’d send you a catalogue of handwritten titles, in the post, and you’d get it, and you wouldn’t even know what any of them was, because it’s not like you could look on the internet and say, “What’s this Centipede Horror?” You’re just like, “Oh, Centipede Horror, that sounds all right.” And then you would either trade them with what you had or you’d post the money in the post, and then, months later, this VHS would arrive. And I would just do that and then copy them and bring them in the store myself to rent out to people.
So, obviously it was a bit dodgy in that respect, but, you know, that was the only way that you could see these films. And also, this was in the ’90s, and Tartan Films in England were becoming this big thing for Asian films. So, me being in America and buying a lot of those Tartan DVDs and VHS from the UK, I’m English, so I thought, “I’m going to go back to England and see if I can get a job at Tartan Films.” And I went back, and I got a job interning there at first, and then became an employee, and that, I guess, started the concept of me working within the world of distribution, not just, like, being interested in it.
[WW] So, what was the step to you setting up Third Window?
[Adam] When I got into Tartan Films, I guess it was around the time that everyone fell in love with them. They were releasing all these bangers every month, and it was a sort of golden age for them. Not just Asian cinema, but for all sorts of films. And then, as the DVD market started to peak, and as J-Horror started to fizzle out, I was there telling them, “Stop just putting all these shit, long-haired ghost films. If you’re gonna buy J-Horror, or, like, genre films, there are all these films from Asia.” But, you know, the thing about a company like that is your image, as a consumer, is, “Wow, they’re this amazing company and everybody must love cinema a lot.” When you end up working there, nobody knows anything about cinema, except for the interns, you know, or, like, the really low people. So, you get a bit disillusioned, and you’re like, “Well, there are all these great films, but they’re just a business,” you know? “They’re just thinking about what to make money with.” So, I started saying, “All right, I’m going to get these films that I think are good for you.” Actually, I initially went to the boss, Hamish McAlpine, with titles, saying, “Look, I’ll buy these films for you and you can release them, because it will make the company better and you won’t have any risk on the money for them.” I went and bought these films, and then, when I told him that, he fired me immediately. In my mind, it was a good thing. But he was, like, “You’re a traitor to the company, and you’ve gone behind my back.”
When I started Third Window Films, my whole point was being a company that anybody could just mail and I’d reply back to them. Because any company or any person that owns a relatively large company, even if they’re distributing minor cult films, he has no connection at all to the consumers. So, he doesn’t care, he’s just living in Soho with, like, a Lamborghini and asking people from the office to sit outside for his car so he doesn’t get a ticket. That’s basically the way that he ran things. And I was really sort of against that. But I thought, you know, “Wouldn’t it be great if I pay for them, and therefore there’s no risk on you?” But, for him, it’s all about money, it’s he that decides everything, and if you go against him, you’re… So, he immediately fired me, the moment I said that, and then I thought, “Well, I better just start it myself.”
[WW] And you make a point of being more collaborative, more kind of collegial, of having good relationships with other people in the industry.
[Adam] It’s really important for me. I mean, I don’t have the name brand or the money or the status to do what I want, like Hamish McAlpine, so I need to be on good terms with everybody. There’s loads of times when I work for, like, months for free, just to help out, even other distributors, where even it could be a loss to my own releases. For example, with films like Crazy Family, the rights are so complicated that I need to basically work as a sales agent on behalf of the Japanese, for free. So, no commission. But what I do is, in order to clear the rights, I need to go to the producers or the rights-holders and go with, like, this much money from all these distributors. Then I can go to them and say, “Look, I have $30,000,” or something like that, “we can do a deal like that.” I work as a producer as well and you always have to think of how everybody would think of an outcome.
So, what I do is, including films like Crazy Family, or any of these other titles that I do, I find distributors overseas, like Error 4444, who are also handling Crazy Family, which I’ve also sold to France and Germany and all these other countries, and then take all their money, together with mine, and go to the rights-holders. But at the same time, that loses sales for me. Even if the region codes may be different, I can still get some sales to America, but now I won’t be able to. And it’s not like I’m getting the film for free myself in exchange, nor am I getting a commission for their sale. And in order, also, to make their release easier, I need to make loads of bonus pictures, subtitling, do all these things for free and then give it to them to make their release easier. It causes a lot of time and stress, and I get nothing out of it. But if I don’t do these things, the films don’t get released at all because the Japanese, like, with Crazy Family and Mermaid Legend, all these films haven’t been released in 40 years because it’s too hard to work with the Japanese rights-holders, especially if the rights are a mess, and also in terms of restorations as well. You can’t just say, “Well, I’ll pay you for the license fee,” then use that to make the restoration. The companies are going to say, “No, you have to pay us the money for restoring and pay us a license fee on top of it,” which is impossible. So, that’s why I do all these things and get all this money from here and there. Like financing a film, like producing a film, it’s imperative to do these things, just for the sake of these films.
[WW] We have a very limited experience of the same process, with some non-English language films. The energy, psychic energy, expense – it can be a wild amount of investment and time.
[Adam] Working with Japanese is not easy at the best of times. Luckily, I do speak Japanese and I live here, so that does move things forward. But there is a reason why Japanese films just don’t get released overseas. I’ve lived here for long enough, I understand how they work, but that also means that I need to switch my mind to…a Japanese mode when I deal with them. But then also, like, the Western mode when I deal with the Westerners and the Western companies and back and forth. And especially for contracts as well, I need to make the contracts in certain ways, and I have to translate it to Japanese. With these, like, ’80s films, especially the Director’s Company, because it’s from a company that went bankrupt, it’s especially complicated. I’ve been working on these for a long time and, in the end, because I’m selling it to all these other distributors in order to get the ball rolling, not only will I lose out on the financial aspect of it, but there’s nothing exclusive about it. When I did Door recently, which was a huge amount of work, and then I sold it to an American company called Terror Vision, and everybody’s like, “Wow, Terror Vision rescued this film Door.”
I’ve only recently started to realise that I should put my logo on the front of the data before I send it [to partners], so that at least, when they put their release out, it says “Third Window Films” on the front. I guess I’m not very good at promoting myself or my company, even, which is just me anyway. But I do realise, for example, there are many film producers that you look on IMDb and they’ve got these lovely profile photos of themselves, and you actually look into it and they’ve done nothing whatsoever. There are other people that do all the hard work and don’t get the credit. But do you really want to put the energy into promoting yourself, or is it the promoting the product? It depends on the person, I guess.
[WW] How do you gauge success, for yourself and for Third Window?
[Adam] Just the sales units. I mean, I also work as a sales agent, for titles like Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River and all that, where I take the film from the beginning and I bring it to festivals, I create a buzz, I do PR, and then I sell it, the rights only, as a job, so I get a commission for that. And in that case, if I sell the remake rights, which I’ve done for a few films, I get money, so that’s fine for me. It helps me buying, like, these tiny, obscure films, but, otherwise, yeah, I guess it’s sales. But it gets hard, because sales just aren’t that good. I would have never done this in the past, but maybe I need to release a film like One Percenter or something, like, a genre film, because maybe that will sell more to people that haven’t heard of Third Window Films, and that might get them into watching the films, which are completely different films anyway. But I’m just trying to try different things, because it’s a lot harder nowadays. I see companies like Radiance, who are doing massive amounts of sales, but they’re a lot more structured, and they’re also not handling just Asian films. When you’re dealing with niche Asian, or especially Japanese-only films, it’s just too niche, I guess, even if you do try to release, like, an action film like One Percenter every so often. It’s tough. I never wanted to distribute a film that has already been distributed, or has a chance of being distributed. You know, my mindset was always, like, if somebody’s going to distribute this film, then there’s no reason for me to distribute the film.
[WW] How do you practically approach something like The Crazy Family, then, that’s arguably even more niche than the earlier Ishii films?
[Adam] Yeah, more obviously genre films have been distributed. I mean, Crazy Thunder Road was a real pain because the music rights had never cleared for overseas use and we had to clear them, but I think Burst City is quite well-known enough that releasing Crazy Thunder Road off that, because it’s a better version of Burst City, made it a little more accessible, ’cause it’s a sort of rock-and roll-punk film. But Crazy Family, even though it’s not really been seen, it’s a film that everybody sort of knows of, like Typhoon Club. Everybody thinks it’s amazing, but it’s just not available. But I’d always wanted to release Crazy Family because it’s my favourite of his, or one of them. I mean, he’s got so many great films that are so different. Years ago, I was looking out for the rights and I ended up at Toho because WField and Toho owned the rights, and neither can move without the other. And Toho were just impossible to work with. If you asked to do a one-off screening, even if it’s a ten-seat cinema, it’s, like, $1,500 minimum. But they don’t care, because they own Godzilla and they’re making so much money.
When I came to Japan, I started learning a little more about the culture here, and also working with Korea before and working with Hong Kong, the reason why they do these things is because even big companies like Toho or Toei, the international divisions are so small. We’re talking a couple of people. Toho, a little more, but Toei’s, like, two people. It’s not worth it for them to draw up a contract and do all this stuff for one screening, unless it’s $1,500. So, those companies, they all have a rule where it’s just, “We’re just not going to sell it.” A film festival can’t play it, or we’re not going to sell the rights to it, unless it’s… For Toho, they won’t sell any film for under $10,000. Any film. Doesn’t matter if it’s, like, a film that no-one’s ever heard of, that’s never been released. They just don’t care. It’s a mix of them not caring and also that they’re just too busy. Japan, it’s all based on the domestic market, because all the money is made domestically. It’s like India, the reason why Indian films aren’t released properly overseas is because everyone who works in the Indian film industry works on the domestic side of it. So, conversely, the reason why Korea is such a big thing and Korean films are such a big thing is because they have had K-pop and everything to expand around the globe and therefore each company has a massive section for International. And they all speak English really well and know exactly what the international market is like, so they know what prices they can sell it at and how to deal with distributors, and all these things which the Japanese just don’t know. For example, Kadokawa is a massive company, they’ve been around for 100 years, they have all these films, and they have one person who handles international film festivals, she doesn’t fucking understand a word of English. Her job is working with international film festivals, she can’t fucking speak English! It’s unbelievable, when you think about it, but, like, that’s just Japan.
Before I came here, when I was working as a festival or buyer or anything, I was like, “What are you asking me, $2,000 for a fucking film screening?!” Even if we had an 800-seat cinema, it’s not going to make the money back for us. Like, it’s crazy. And then I came here, and I realised, like, “Ah, that’s the reason why.” I still think they’re ruining Japanese film culture because, by not doing the deals, no films are being released, and then when you have a new film that you want to go overseas, people are going to be so far away from Japanese film culture that they’re not going to be interested in buying your new film. Also, working as a producer here and distributor also here as well, I realised it’s just such a small amount of money, compared to the amount of money we’re going to make in Japan, that, like, is it even worth it? You have to put so much energy in for such a small return. I mean, you have to really think of the big picture, so that’s why, I guess, you have all these issues with so many of these films, especially the older ones, because there are less and less people alive who are even connected or remember them.
So, a friend of mine, a few years ago, found all these negatives for Director’s Company, including Door and Typhoon Club and Crazy Family, all these films. Obviously, I loved Crazy Family, but him finding the negatives started the process, this rights clearance issue and these re-scanning of films. And because I started releasing all these Director’s Company films – first of all with Door and Typhoon Club and Guard from Underground – I thought, “Well, Ishii Sogo was part of the Director’s Company,” and Crazy Family was his only film for them, except for Half Human, which is a short film, “that needs to be a part of this series, because it’s a seminal film of the Director’s Company.” The thing about Ishii Sogo, he’s a director. There are some directors who also understand the other aspects of the industry, like Tsukamoto Shinya, who understand about distribution, understand about rights, ownership. But Ishii Sogo, he goes to anybody, “I’m just desperate to make this film.” Like, “Just make it happen.” And he goes on to the next project. So, he doesn’t understand about the rights to the film, who owns it. So, his films just get lost, in that respect. And he’s always onto the next film, so he doesn’t really, I guess, care so much about finding out about what happened to the last ones. I wanted to release some of his other films, like Angel Dust and Labyrinth of Dreams, but that would be just more hectic. Considering I’m already focused on the Director’s Company series at the moment, I might as well just put all my attention on The Crazy Family. There are more obscure titles from the Director’s Company that become a little more sellable, once people are buying into that label, that sub-label, and therefore, it keeps it going a little more. It was only around for ten years, and most of the films from the company aren’t very good and so it’ll probably fade out by the end of year, I’d imagine, and I’ll have to move on to the next thing.
Theatrical poster for The Crazy Family (illustration by Teruhiko Yumura)
[WW] And so, you always have your eye on the next thing, you must have stuff percolating. Or do you have to kind of keep your entire focus on the current thing?
[Adam] I need to plan at least a little bit ahead, but a lot of the time things just fall out of the sky. This Director’s Company series was just a situation where I ran into somebody, they had these negatives and, okay, let’s move on with that. But I don’t even know what I’m going to release next year. I know what I’m releasing this year, in terms of other titles, but next year I have nothing. So, I need to hope that new films get made, or things fall into place.
[WW] When you have the film and you know you’re going to release it, I understand that you do the subtitles yourself. Does that mean translation or preparing the materials, or both of those things?
[Adam] For the feature subtitles, usually I don’t, because they’re usually ready. You know, I think most Japanese films, even if they’re old, they usually have feature subtitles because they’ve played at a film festival in the past. There have been some films where I’ve just re-subtitled the film myself. Like Door and Door II, I just did them myself, because in those cases, I was also working with the sale agent for them, so I needed to have subtitles to show them to film festivals. So, in those cases, I will do the subtitles, but it’s mostly for the bonus features.
Obviously, I need to save as many costs as I can, so usually I do all the subtitling for the bonus features, like audio commentaries, making-of’s, interviews – anything like that, I’ll do that. For the translations, usually [I work] with a few different people. I have a Japanese friend that speaks English, who lives in England, to do some work, to read through, and then I’ll read through and I’ll send it out to a few people, and we’ll just fix it up, in that respect.
For the extras, first of all, when I came into the industry 20 years ago, and it was like you could sell a DVD with burned-in subtitles and, like, no extras and, like, you’d sell it for 20 quid and it would totally be fine. Now, everybody wants fucking all these extras and, like, stupid packaging and all that. And as somebody not from that generation… I don’t even have a television, I don’t care about 4K or anything like that. For me, it was just more important that I was seeing the film, and nowadays, that just doesn’t work. But, then again, nobody watches the extras, but you’ve got to have them on there.
Sometimes, I try to find people on YouTube that have made, like, good video essays and just ask them, “Do you want to do one for me?” I think the problem is sometimes you end up just going back to the same old people. But then, I think, as a consumer, every time you look and it’s another commentary by this person or it’s another one by that person, it gets a bit stale. The design, as well, for posters, you don’t really want to ask the same designer every time, but you find somebody who’s easy to go with and it just becomes a sort of go-to. It’s just, I guess, ease of a rhythm, I guess, than trying to find out new people and hoping that they turn out well or not. Because you could go and make the effort to find these people that sound like they could do a good job, and then you get the product, you’re like, “What the fuck is this?”
The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族, Sogo Ishii, 1984)
[WW] How do you feel about piracy? Are there degrees of it that you’re comfortable with?
[Adam] Yeah, I mean, it’s a double-edged sword, because I understand why somebody would want to help enrich others with a film that is not available anywhere, and therefore they put it on the internet. Of course, at the same time I’d be like, “Well, I’m just not going to release that film now,” because it’s available too easily on the internet. But then again, I might think, “Well, the moment I release my copy, it’s immediately going to be put on the internet anyway.” Which is a reason why a lot of Japanese companies don’t want to sell the films for small amount, because they sell somebody the rights for, like, $3,000, and then the person who puts it out makes it available to be pirated when it’s a film that has never been pirated before and therefore it’s going to kill their sales.
When I bought a film recently from another company, I put it out, and then it got put on the internet, and they were, like, “Now we’ve lost the US sale for it,” because now it’s just too easily available everywhere, and what can I do? But I understand that that makes them think, “Well, we’re just not going to want to sell it for anything less than an amount that makes it worth it being now available to anybody online.” So, it’s complicated. But I think people who are going to download it are going to download it whether or not there’s a copy to buy anywhere.
I think there’s so many people nowadays that they’re just used to it. It’s unbelievable sometimes. I’ll post up something on the Third Window Films’ Facebook, and the moment I put it up, they’re like, “Can somebody send me a download link?” I’m like, “What the fuck?” But that’s just the mindset of people now, especially people that are from an era that films are so readily available, internet is so fast that that’s how they think. Maybe they don’t think it’s a bad thing and you can’t tell somebody with that mindset, “No, you should be paying for this.” And the world has changed with Netflix, because somebody could pay £10 a month and have access to thousands of films. And it’s like, “Why should I rent this one film digitally for, like, £3? I can pay £10, £5 a month and get MUBI with 1,000 films,” or, “£5 is close to zero, I’ll just download it”, you know? There’s no gap any more, in that respect. And, in that case, what am I to say? That’s just the world we live in. That’s why we have to make these collectors editions, because it has to be worth something that people want to have in their home, that they’ll pay the amount for. Otherwise, if it was just a disc with no bonus features on it, people will just download it anyway.
One of the reasons I moved to Japan – I enjoy living in Japan so much – is that I was getting a bit tired of distribution in the UK, because of piracy and such. Japan has no piracy, no piracy whatsoever, because the police cracked down on it, big-time. The whole market is completely different. Video-on-demand is really not a big thing here, despite the fact we have such great internet. It’s like going back in time, you know? The UK market, it’s all day-and-date, you release it in cinemas and you’re on digital, and it’s all the same day. Back in the days of distribution, before Netflix, you always had the holdbacks, and you’d have a VHS rental. Before sell-through, you’d have a copy just for rental shops. The world has changed so much, and with that, film distribution. But Japan is like an outlier because most films only get a theatrical release here and don’t get a video release or VOD release. Recently, VOD has become a little more, but there’s no sell-through on a lot of titles, a lot of it’s just rental. You still have video rental shops as, like, a normal thing. And people still go to the cinema, and there’s still a hold-back of, like, six months or so between the theatrical and the video.
The cinema experience is quite different here because a film can only be seen in the cinemas, and therefore, you know, you have to go to the cinema to watch it. And it also allows for the film industry and for independent cinemas to continue going, where you can see so many independent films in cinemas. I think one of the reasons I stopped theatrical distribution in the UK was cinemas would take a film of mine, not put any of the posters up, not promote it at all, and then, like, give it a fucking 11am slot, and then nobody would come on the first day and they would just cancel it. And, it’s like, well, what about word of mouth, you know? There are so many films, if it wasn’t for word of mouth, the film would have died. And in Japan, you can have a film made for, like, $5,000 by a student get a three-week run. Boom. No problem. Every day. And that allows for word of mouth and for things like One Cut of the Dead to become huge successes. And the cinema will do so much effort to promote your film. That really made me fall in love with distribution again, because they’re keeping it like the old style.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Third Window’s restoration of The Crazy Family is released on Blu-ray on 17th June, 2024, as part of their Director’s Company series, details here.
Yongman Kim, subject of Kim's Video (Ashley Sabin & David Redmon, 2023)
We’re thrilled to announce that Weird Weekend returns in 2024 with monthly screenings leading into the WWIV festival, 25-27th October 2024!
Every month, we’ll be screening the best New Weird Cinema alongside brand-new restorations, while the festival itself will be more focussed than ever before on strange and unseen cinema from around the world. We have a special focus this year on the programmers, curators and archivists who champion, preserve and celebrate these films, expanding the cult canon and exploring new perspectives.
We also have a new venue in the GAMIS Cinema, a brand-new screening space in Glasgow’s Govanhill. The GAMIS Cinema is an emerging venue, aiming to bring cinema to the Southside alongside artists studios, exhibition and community projects. Directly opposite Queen’s Park train station, the GAMIS Cinema will be growing and developing over the course of 2024.
Our monthly screening series, taking place on the final Friday of every month, commences on 29th March with the new documentary Kim’s Video, followed in April by Third Window’s brand-new restoration of The Crazy Family (first screened at the inaugural WW in 2018) and in May by Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann. All screenings are priced on a sliding scale and feature Descriptive Subtitles for the entire programme, optional Audio Description and live captioning for intros and Q&As.
Tickets for the first three monthly screenings are on sale now.
Weird Weekend is funded by Screen Scotland. Screen Scotland drives the development of all aspects of Scotland’s film and TV industry, through funding and strategic support. Screen Scotland is part of Creative Scotland and delivers these services and support with funding from Scottish Government and The National Lottery.
We’re marking this year’s festival dates with a very special online-exclusive outing for Weird Weekend’s UNSEE event, where we invite guest programmers to respond to a unique prompt. This year’s exclusive UNSEE programme streams live on our online cinema, once on 29th October (exclusively in the UK) and then again on 5th November (exclusively in the US), 1am to 1am.*
UNSEE takes place in the hour before the clocks go back, meaning that, as soon as it’s finished, it’s like it never happened. Our guest programmers can share something they couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t otherwise in what for you, the audience, is an hour of your life you actually will get back.
Last year, we invited curator and director Elizabeth Purchell (Ask Any Buddy) to curate a full programme, ELIZABETH PURCHELL: UNSEE, around her UNSEE hour at Weird Weekend at CCA, Glasgow.
This year, we’ve invited VERA DREW, director of The People’s Joker, to create a very special hour of entertainment for you. This hour is curated exclusively for Weird Weekend and VERA DREW:UNSEE will stream once and never again.*
Vera Drew, director of The People’s Joker and 2023 UNSEE guest programmer
AND we’re thrilled to announce we’ll be returning to a monthly screening programme next year, leading into Weird Weekend’s fourth edition in October 2024. We’ll be hosting new programmes on our online cinema on the last weekend of every month, starting in January, as well as hosting related physical events locally and internationally.
Weird Weekend and its related monthly screening series are dedicated to the orphans, outcasts and outliers of cult cinema – strange and compelling films that due to circumstance or sheer personality have fallen through the cracks of the canon. Underpinning our events is a focus on access and inclusion, so as many people as possible can see these wild and incredible films that are otherwise out of circulation. All events at Weird Weekend, including VERA DREW: UNSEE feature optional descriptive subtitles and audio description and are priced on a sliding scale – you decide what to pay based on your means, with reference to our tiered guide.
*UNSEE will stream once in the UK when the clocks go back, in the early hours of Sunday 29th October, then again in the USA, when the clocks go back on 5th November (one stream per timezone: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific). Each stream, though, is one-and-done and geoblocked to each timezone – e.g. if you’re in New York, you’ll only be able to watch the Vera Drew: Unsee (US Eastern Timezone).
Matchbox Cine | Matchbox Cine is an independent exhibitor of outcasts, orphans and outliers and an award-winning subtitler, specialising in access provision in film exhibition and distribution. Established in 2010, they programme, curate and promote cult film events, including the festivals Weird Weekend, Cage-a-rama and KeanuCon. In parallel, they’ve made access materials (descriptive subtitles and audio description) for over 3,000 films and short films.
Weird Weekend | Weird Weekend is an annual cult film festival based in Glasgow, Scotland, founded, programmed and produced by Matchbox Cine. Past editions have brought to Glasgow exclusive and world and UK premiere screenings, including Tom Schiller’s Nothing Lasts Forever on 35mm, Craig Denney’s The Astrologer, Wil Aaron’s O’r Ddaear Hen and John Paizs’ Crime Wave: The Original Cut. In 2022, we restored and premiered Fredric Hobbs’ “lost” film Troika (1969), commissioned the first English subtitles for Welsh language horrors Gwaed Ar Y Sêr (1975) and O’r Ddaear Hen (1981), premiered a brand-new restoration of Claude d’Anna’s Trompe l’oeil (1975), with our newly translated English subtitles, and toured Kier-La Janisse around the UK to celebrate the 10th anniversary expanded edition of her book, House of Psychotic Women.
Vera Drew | A genuine multi-hyphenate, Vera is an accomplished filmmaker and actor who came up in TV post production. Once known in her alternative comedy circle as an “editor that thinks like a writer,” she expertly edited and contributed visual effects to dozens of iconic comedy televisions shows, including Check It Out With Dr. Steve Brule, The Birthday Boys, Krft Punk’s Political Party (for which she got her first contributing writer credit), season two of I Think You Should Leave, three seasons of Comedy Bang! Bang! on IFC, and On Cinema (she later went onto direct season 12). Having honed her skills at Tim and Eric’s Abso Lutely Productions (a company known for incubating some of the industry’s most unique editors), Vera’s talent as an editor has been recognized by the Television Academy in 2019 when she was nominated for Emmy for her work on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? That same year, she launched Tim and Eric’s streaming TV network (for which she wrote and directed four series and hours of original content) . Prior to that, Vera was a contributor to Highland Park TV and Everything Is Terrible. Most recently, Vera Drew finished her first feature film, The People’s Joker – a Queer coming of age comic book parody that premiered at TIFF in Fall of 2021to critical acclaim and minor controversy. A proud trans woman born and raised in the south suburbs of Chicago, she has been making funny, spooky, and/or queer short films and music videos for most of her life. She is currently writing her next feature film and trying to #FreeThePeoplesJoker.
