Oddball Films would like to
invite you to our new Seasonal Seminar
Series. We'll be opening the vaults of our incredibly unique stock footage
company and film archive and inviting intriguing professional personalities to
share their unique insights in various realms of cinema for filmmakers, post-production
professionals and students inside San Francisco’s strangest film archive and
microcinema. Our first guest, Marc Huestis is a cultural institution
and a living local legend. An
award-winning filmmaker, festival organizer, and presenter, Huestis is a larger
than life camp icon. He will be on Oddball’s cine-stage divulging his dirty
secrets of underground filmmaking centered around his cult masterpiece Whatever
Happened to Susan Jane? (1982).
The film utilizes the 1950s social guidance film The Outsider to hilarious
effect in its flash back sequences, recontextualizing the didactic mental
hygiene short into a campy nostalgia-fest. It's also an opportunity for students and professionals to tour a working film archive and to see the ins and outs of the exciting world of stock footage, film restoration, digitization and screening. This warehouse of celluloid delights is the home to over 50,000 tins of actual, tactile film, from 8mm to 16mm to 35mm; from feature films to educational shorts, military training films, antique erotica, ephemeral films, ethnographic pieces, commercials, and animation. Oddball Films has provided unique stock footage for projects like Transparent, Going Clear, Behind the Candelabra, Milk, Mythbusters, Boing Boing, and more commercials, documentaries, music video, feature films and television worldwide. In today's world of digital media, most college students won't even remember film as a medium, despite its long and glorious history and its potential to survive long beyond any digital media type. This is a chance to re-instill a love of the original moving picture format in the next generation of media makers, as well as demonstrate one of the many facets of the production world that often goes unnoticed.
Tuesday, October 4th 2016
Tour and lunch at 12, talk and Q+A at 1PM, light lunch provided
$15.00, limited seating RSVP to info@oddballfilms.com
Oddball Films, 275 Capp st. San Francisco, CA
94110
Notes
from Marc Huestis:
When returning from another stoned out night at the Stud circa 1980, I noticed an open trash can on Haight St. overflowing with a cache of 16mm films. I snatched them up, planning to use them as "slug" (a term used for filler for editing purposes). Out of curiosity, I decided to project a few. Most were junk, but within the stack lie an amazing cosmic find - a campy little chestnut entitled “The Outsider”.
When returning from another stoned out night at the Stud circa 1980, I noticed an open trash can on Haight St. overflowing with a cache of 16mm films. I snatched them up, planning to use them as "slug" (a term used for filler for editing purposes). Out of curiosity, I decided to project a few. Most were junk, but within the stack lie an amazing cosmic find - a campy little chestnut entitled “The Outsider”.
This 15-minute gem was produced by "Young American Films" who specialized in 50's
educational shorts with "important" messages for budding teenage
minds. These were the kind of films you were forced to view in 8th Grade Health
Class as you were dodging spitballs lobbed at you by the jocks.
"The Outsider" turned out to be a trash masterpiece-
a conformist cautionary tale. It followed the trails and travails of poor
little "outsider" Susan Jane Smith - a reclusive high school student
with bad skin, even worse hair, no friends, and zero self-esteem. Shot in stark
black & white, it featured Ozzie and Harriet morality, John Waters
style bad acting and absurdist voice of god narration. It inspired my first
sync sound feature length film "Whatever Happened to Susan Jane?"
I used “The Outsider” as the backbone
of the story, then fantasizing about the characters now grown up in wacky
world of Punk Boho San Francisco.