The story of The Movie Orgy as told by Joe Dante to Alex Fitch

The story of making The Movie Orgy as told to I'm Ready for My Close-Up FM radio show host Alex Fitch. This is my transcription of the radio program. TMO plays today (July 27, 2025) in resorted version in London. – EK

The Movie Orgy [was] the first film that I ever did. It used to run seven hours. It is made entirely of found footage. It came about because in the late 60s, there was a lot of interest in "camp" movies. Susan Sontag's essay had come out and people were discussing the issue. The 1943 Batman serial was released as an entire package. You would go and you would sit in the theatre and you'd watch five hours of chapter plays and you would see all the cheating that went on from the end of chapter two to the beginning of chapter three. "Wait a minute, he got hit by a truck at the end of chapter two but in the beginning of chapter three he rolls away from the truck because they figured after the week went by the kids wouldn't remember." Anyway, it was very funny and it was also interestingly very racist because it was World War II production.

There was something about the idea of sitting through all five hours of it that made you a little crazy, and the audience really loved it. For some reason, I decided that I would do something similar, and I put together a serial. I got a copy of the serial The Phantom Creeps with Bela Lugosi and started intercutting it with other footage from other sources, and ran it at the Philadelphia College of Art to great acclaim. Everybody was happy.

My friend John Davison and I decided to take this concept of running a bunch of stuff for hours and put together our own film. He was at NYU at the time, and we had a screening at NYU of what was then called The Movie Orgy. It was seven hours long. It consisted of several features, which we would run on one projector, and then whenever it got boring, we would cut out of that projector and go to this reel of stuff that we had prepared — which could be run up until we managed to scroll down on the other projector to the next scene that was worth seeing.

We would reduce every movie to maybe 40 minutes or 30 minutes by just cutting out stuff. We would take different plots and cross them, and take movies where actors played similar parts and make it look like it was all one movie.

This eventually turned into a very profitable enterprise for us because the Schlitz Beer Company saw one of the presentations at Columbia University and decided they wanted to sponsor us and let us send this film around to college campuses. They would give free beer, and they’d give us $100 for every showing.

We had this one 16mm print consisting of lots of different footage from different movies — all different levels of focus and different sound levels. You had to literally refocus every time there was a splice, and there were like 2,000 splices.

On occasion it would break, but we would always have two projectors, so we could switch to the other projector while we fixed something. We had an ad that we made up called The 2001 Splice Odyssey. This was a compendium of things that our audience — which was college kids in the late ’60s — hadn’t seen in years, like old TV shows from when they were kids. It was sort of designed to be walked out on — the idea being that if you decided to get a pizza and come back, you hadn’t missed anything.

John and I were both 16mm film collectors, and so we had amassed this bunch of stuff: commercials from years gone by, pieces of films, pieces of industrial films, trailers — everything that we could find. They would all be cut together with a sort of point to it. It's difficult to describe without seeing it, but it became quite popular and actually sort of put me through the Roger Corman school of filmmaking — while I was working for Roger for no money, we were still making money by sending this film around.

Then it was dormant for many years, and I happened to come across it in my garage, and I thought, I wonder if it still runs. I ran it, and I thought, This is really getting beat up, and the sprockets are torn. I should make a copy of this on video before it’s too late. So I did, and we ran it at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. And of course, we couldn’t charge admission because I don’t have the rights to any of the stuff that’s in here — and some of it I don’t even know what it is. For whatever reason, it was this phenomenon. People turned out for it. There were lines around the block.

It’s one of those projects that’s been talked about in movie blogs for years. It was this mysterious movie that people seemed to remember seeing, but no one knew where it was. We got this tremendous turnout, and celebrities came, and everybody thought it was hilarious. So we brought it back again the next year. Then, last year, we ran it in Venice at the Venice Film Festival [2009], and there were some scholarly treatises written about it — which is always pretty funny.

We don’t have the time to run the entire film here, so what I’ve done is made a highlight reel of 90 minutes’ worth of what is now a five-hour movie. It was seven hours, but then pieces kept getting lost, so I thought I’d better make a copy of it while I’ve got most of it.

It’s very American. It’s very baby-boomer-centric. There’s a lot of things in it that I don’t know if they will travel across the pond — although in Venice they seemed to get most of it. Some of it is in very bad taste, although I don’t think we’re running any of that stuff. It’s very anti-military, because of course our attitude at the moment during the Vietnam War was very down on all that stuff.

We had all these pieces from a film library that went out of business, and so we would just put them up in the projector and run them. If there was something funny, we’d make a note of what it was, and then we’d try to find something to cut to from it or before it, and then we’d put it in. I used to tape them to the wall with little notes and stuff. And there are a lot of things in it that just defy identification. I just don’t know what they are — little pieces from movies, and I don’t recognize the actors, I don’t recognize the sets. Usually I’m pretty good at being able to tell cold what movie something is from, but in this case, there are some things that have just eluded me.

There are also some commercials that are for products no longer being made — very campy and very funny — and you just get an idea of what a different world it is now from the one we grew up in.

When it played to a full house in Bologna. Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023

I don’t think I probably could have gotten my job editing trailers for Roger Corman if I hadn’t done this film first, because this was true primitive cutting. I mean, we couldn’t mix it, so we had to use whatever sound was there. When you make a splice, the sound overlaps, so you had to account for that. I had no movie viewer, I didn’t have any kind of help — I had to literally put each piece up on the projector, mark it, take it down, splice it, put it back up on the projector. It’s astonishing that the film even exists. I mean, it was beat up so much. But when I did end up making trailers for Roger, I fell back on some of the same techniques that I had used when I was cutting this film.

I’ve always been interested in all kinds of films. When I was a kid, I spent my Saturday afternoons at the movies, and I spent as much time in front of the TV watching old movies as I was allowed to. And being a movie buff — as you know — there are no old movies; there are just movies, and movies you haven’t seen.

When I came to work for Roger, I had started collecting 16mm film by then, so I had my own collection — a lot of films that you couldn’t see elsewhere, I had prints of. So I didn’t feel like I was deprived. Most people, if they didn’t see a movie on TV when it was on, had to wait another year for it to be shown. If they didn’t see it in the theatre, they had to wait a couple of years for it to go on television. And then, when it went on television, it was all cut up and in black and white.

The ease with which people can now access the filmgoing experience is just remarkable to those of us who had to suffer through the lean years, when movies really weren’t taken very seriously and were just stuff to run between commercials. When I came out to California, that was pretty much the way it was — old movies were on at night, interrupted by used car commercials, and they thought nothing of cutting off the first 10 minutes of the movie, because that was the easiest way to make it shorter. They wouldn’t run the credits, and they wouldn’t identify the movie in between. So you had no way to know what you were watching. It was just... it was a different world.

And then, when the videocassette came in — the idea of actually owning movies, where anybody could have a movie if they could just, you know, buy it or rent it — that sort of changed the whole equation for me. Because I was used to sort of having the only way to see 8½ for my friends, because I had a print. Now, all of a sudden, they could get a cassette of it.

I still have movies on 16mm that I think will never come out on DVD or video. But for the most part, that technology is completely gone.

When I was a kid, on TV they were always running old movies. People talked about old movies. Old movies weren’t “old” — they were just movies. But now that we have access to so many of these old pictures, the problem is that people need to be directed to them. They need to know about them.

And that’s why I started my website Trailers from Hell, which is an attempt to try to get people familiar with movies that they may not even know exist. There’s a lot of material out there that you can access — but again, you have to know what you’re looking for. You have to have some sense.