Back to selection
“Self-Aware Doesn’t Work for Us”: Joe Dante on The Movie Orgy, Matinee at 30 and William Castle’s The Tingler
Matinee. All of Joe Dante‘s films revolve around distinctly American paranoias—consumerism, threats to the nuclear family, suburban NIMBY sensibilities—but none feel more entrenched in a tangible era of American anxiety than Matinee. Now 30 years old, the film takes place during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, centering B-movie shlock jockey Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman, riffing big time on William Castle), who lands in a panicked Key West, Florida for a promotional screening of his radioactive new horror film Mant (half-man, half-ant, all monster!)
Both enraptured and horrified by the real-world implications Woolsey’s film hints at (nuclear disfigurement, neighborhoods-turned-warzones, the sudden loss of our loved ones), the entire community shows up to either watch or protest the film, drumming up publicity for the financially-struggling Woolsey. During a sold-out showing of Mant, Key West residents end up enacting the very doomsday scenarios they’ve desperately hoped to avoid (or at least hoped their over-preparedness for would have proven unnecessary).
Anthology Film Archives in New York City is currently hosting a Joe Dante retrospective oriented around the nearly five-hour supercut collage film The Movie Orgy (screenings of which are free, per tradition), first assembled in 1966 by Dante and Jon Davison and recently converted to a DCP by American Genre Film Archives. This weekend featured 35mm screenings of Matinee, Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The Bad Batch. The final screening of The Movie Orgy will be on Monday, April 10.
I spoke with Dante at a hotel restaurant shortly after a double feature of Matinee and The Tingler he aided in programming at the Overlook Film Festival. We discussed how he and the festival team implemented Castle’s patented Percepto! for The Tingler, watching Matinee with a receptive audience and what we can learn from even the most tasteless portions of The Movie Orgy.
Filmmaker: I was able to catch the screenings of Matinee and The Tingler, and it was really quite the experience. Thank you for participating in the festival and organizing that.
Dante: It was practically the same movie!
Filmmaker: Have you managed to see any other films at the festival since you’ve arrived?
Dante: We’ve been here a very short time. We saw one movie, Trim Season. It was a female director and a mostly female cast. Very good and beautifully photographed. I was impressed.
Filmmaker: When it came to organizing the 30th anniversary screening of Matinee alongside The Tingler, was it always conceived as a double feature? What drew you to program this Castle title above all others, aside from the distinct similarities between the films?
Dante: It’s not my favorite William Castle film. My favorite is House on Haunted Hill, which I think has a great combination of funny and scary. But Castle’s movies are all melodramas; they’re basically unbelievable. The Tingler, particularly, is one of the more preposterous movies ever made [laughs], but it was made, obviously, to be seen with the gimmick. The character of Lawrence Woolsey is based—not entirely, but largely—on William Castle, to the point where we even imitate the framing of the trailers. It’s obvious that there’s a connection. When the 30th anniversary—which I still can’t believe it’s been 30 years—came up with this movie, I’d been to Overlook before, and they said they wanted to do something for it. I said, “Well, we should run a William Castle movie, and it would be great if we could run The Tingler with Percepto!” It’s been done in various places. In LA, John Waters has a couple of screenings of it every so often, and there are different ways of trying to recreate the seat buzzer thing.
Today’s was basically from the [original] manual, because the woman who put it all together was very dedicated. She had a copy of the manual that they gave to exhibitors that explains how you do this stuff and at what point in the movie people scream, or get carried out or whatever. I think it just appealed to everybody’s idea of, “This really sounds like a lot of fun.” And in practice, seeing Matinee with an audience was very satisfying. I mean, the movie just works with an audience. And this audience in particular was not composed entirely of people who’ve seen the movie many times.
Filmmaker: I was surprised when I saw how many people’s hands shot up when they asked who hadn’t seen the movie before.
Dante: Well, nobody saw it before, but it was very well received [today]. When you watch The Tingler and Matinee, both climaxes are in a movie theater. I’m not so sure if when we did the screenplay for Matinee we were consciously aware of the fact that we were duplicating The Tingler. I’ve even forgotten that it’s got a scene where The Tingler crosses the screen in the projection booth, which I realized I ripped off for Gremlins 2.
Filmmaker: You were saying that seeing Matinee with an audience was a really wonderful experience for you—
Dante: Well, first of all, seeing Matinee with an audience that’s more than five people [laughs].
Filmmaker: I know, you said that it really didn’t draw a crowd when it was initially released.
Dante: It’s not a movie that you can easily tell what it’s about. It had no names in it—except for John Goodman, who had a certain cachet but, you know, they weren’t lining up to see him [laughs]. So, it just sort of fell through the cracks, and it wasn’t because the studio didn’t like the movie. It was just that it wasn’t their kind of movie. They really didn’t know how to sell it.
Filmmaker: I wasn’t there 30 years ago, but it felt like it got lost in the marketing shuffle a bit.
Dante: It was. But on the plus side, working for Universal allowed us to use the music from their movies, which we put all throughout Mant. They were very good to us. They let us make the movie we wanted to make. It’s an unusual studio movie in that it’s like an indie. I think they were sorry it didn’t make any money. I know I was sorry. But they were very supportive, and they gave me a chance to make a movie that I would have never gotten a chance to make anywhere else.
Filmmaker: Even by today’s standards, it seems like a rare film to be made with that kind of studio support.
Dante: The studios aren’t what they used to be.
Filmmaker: While watching Matinee, I noticed that the film takes place roughly 30 years before it was released, and it’s now been 30 years since then. Reflecting on the film now, did you glean any particular insights about the cultural and political climate the film surveys versus the era we’re currently living in? Do you think it made any interesting parallels or predictions?
Dante: I wouldn’t say predictions. But the fact that there were these air drills and now we have school shooting drills feels like the same thing but worse. Then there’s the run on the supermarket, which we saw during COVID. “Where’s the toilet paper?! I want the shredded wheat!” I mean, come on. It’s so funny how some movies that you make become so prescient in ways that you never intended.
Filmmaker: I’m also curious if you have any particular memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Dante: Absolutely. The whole movie is based on my experiences. I mean, I didn’t live in Florida, I lived in New Jersey.
Filmmaker: Whereabouts?
Dante: Livingston, but we were all sure that there was not going to be a Monday. As a child, when I walked to school, there was an air of paranoia. If an airplane flew overhead, you thought, “Is there a bomb?” At school, when the airplane would fly over, everybody would tense up because they would wait for the whistle of the bomb, only the whistle didn’t come. So we’d go, “OK,” and move on. But it was a very scary period. When I think back on it, we managed to take it in stride like the Brits did in WWII. We just went on with our lives.
Filmmaker: When I get back to New York, I’m really anticipating going to the Anthology Film Archives retrospective of some of your films on 35mm and The Movie Orgy.
Dante: Don’t expect too much [laughs].
Filmmaker: You first embarked on that project back in college, right?
Dante: A friend of mine, Jon Davison, was a 16mm film collector who got me into film. We went to see the reissue of the 1943 Batman, and they ran all 15 chapters in one sitting. It was an endurance test. At the end of every chapter, they would of course have the cliffhanger where Batman would get crushed by a rock. Then at the beginning of the next chapter, you’d see that there was another shot they had left out where Batman rolled away before the rock hit. So, it was all about how they cheated. It was also extremely racist, because it was from World War II, so there’s a lot of anti-Japanese propaganda. It gave a lot of us insight into our parents’ attitudes.
But there was something about the idea of that much time devoted to silly stuff that made us think, “We could rent a serial and run it, or put in some cartoons and cut some other stuff.” It eventually turned into this seven-hour movie. We would rent a bunch of different movies and use the first reel, then stop when it got boring and put on the second reel of another picture, and we’d have a lot of other ancillary stuff we’d put together. We ran it at NYU one night and it was very popular. Then we got a call from Schlitz beer, who saw it and said, “We want to give you guys some money to take this thing around to colleges. We’ll sell beer, run your movie and pay you money.”
Filmmaker: Right, because you couldn’t charge for this.
Dante: Well, technically we didn’t own any of the rights.
Filmmaker: And they still can’t charge for it now.
Dante: I told them they couldn’t charge, because I don’t know what’s in it. I mean, I know some of the stuff is public domain. But some of it is not. I just said, “Look, it’s much easier to not charge and sell beer. Sell cartoons. Sell anything.” You can make money doing something else. Get donations.
But over the years, the film got shorter, it got longer. If we found something funny, we’d put it in. If something didn’t get a laugh, we’d take it out. Then we retired it when I went to work for Roger Corman, because it was too much trouble. There was only one print, and we took it around to all of these colleges and it had thousands of splices in it. Every time you ran it, you had to change the focus and the sound. It was exhausting.
Filmmaker: So you had to travel and attune it with every screening. You couldn’t just ship it off and let anyone else handle it.
Dante: No, because we were the only ones who knew where it went. Then a number of years ago, I guess in the ’90s, we made a video copy and ran it at the New Beverly Theater in LA, wondering if anybody would even show up. I would hear people occasionally say, “The Movie Orgy was so amazing.” It was sort of this legendary thing. If you’d go on IMDb, there’s a lot of testimonials. But we ran it there and it was a huge hit. There was a line around the block, and people stayed for the entire thing. It was made to be walked out on. The idea was, if you want to go get a slice of pizza, you can come back and you won’t have missed anything.
So it was huge, but the problem was that it was just falling apart. Finally, these guys at American Genre Film Archive sprung for a restoration, which just meant turning it into video so that it doesn’t fall apart, and they’re taking it around the country. But the thing is, it does work better with if I intro the film and say, “Look, don’t expect this to be slick. There’s no mixing involved, it’s all splices. We used to call it 2001: A Splice Odyssey. It’s in very bad taste, it’s of its time.” It really needs that presentation. I remember my niece, who was about 16, was there when they ran it at the Museum of Modern Art, and lasted about two hours [laughs]. She came out, and I said, “Oh, so you don’t like it?” She said, “I don’t understand any of it!”
Filmmaker: Nowadays people love to harp over movies being too long.
Dante: Oh, everything’s so long. It’s all too long.
Filmmaker: How does that sentiment translate to the new audience for this movie?
Dante: This is a little different, because it’s something that changes every couple of minutes.
Filmmaker: Do you remember what got nixed from the seven hour version? What was that editing process like?
Dante: Things didn’t get nixed for any reason other than stuff just got so scratched we couldn’t use it anymore. We’d alternate a bunch of different movies. It used to include I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Return of the Ape Man, which is a Bela Lugosi movie. There was Little Shop of Horrors. There were a number of other pictures, but the Schlitz people kept saying, “It’s too long. Can’t you put The Flintstones in?” I’d say, “No, you don’t get it. The Flintstones are an imitation of something else. It’s self-aware. Self-aware doesn’t work for us. What only works for us is stuff that was meant to be taken sincerely and now doesn’t look the same.” The Schlitz people kind of botched it all up. Anyway, this is what’s left. It has a lot of funny stuff in it, and it also has a lot of embarrassing, sexist stuff in it.
Filmmaker: But that’s appropriate as a capsule of its time. Like you said with the Batman series, it offers insight about your parents’ era that made you understand where they came from in terms of certain sentiments. The Movie Orgy and other cinematic artifacts have inherent value to them, even if they don’t measure up by today’s standards.
Dante: They’re rewriting Agatha Christie. They’re rewriting Roald Dahl. You can’t rewrite these people! You put a disclaimer on the front and say, “Maybe some people will be upset.” They just put a disclaimer on Gone with the Wind. But at least they didn’t rewrite the book.
Filmmaker: There’s a fascism to rewriting.
Dante: It’s awful. The fact that their estates are signing off on this is embarrassing.
Filmmaker: Something that’s been really popular among young people are these mega-cut YouTube compilations, which is what The Movie Orgy kind of feels like in spirit. It’s definitely more well-curated than, you know, Family Guy Funniest Moments or whatever.
Dante: It’s an early found footage.
Filmmaker: It’s interesting to see how the culture has swung to be perfectly primed for these short clips, what with shortening attention spans. What is scrolling through TikTok except a mega compilation of things that are “curated” for your interest?
Dante: That’s right. But the problem is, of course, that you immediately forget them. The funny thing about The Movie Orgy is that people didn’t forget it. Partly, that was because there was so much material in there that wasn’t available to them because there was no internet, lots of clips from old TV shows that they saw when they were kids. It was like a nostalgia trip for them. Now, it’s harder to [recreate] that, because everything is on YouTube, and, again, you have somebody who puts it all together for you. Are you going back to New York?
Filmmaker: Yes, I leave tomorrow.
Dante: What else are they showing [at Anthology]?
Filmmaker: I’m definitely attending the double bill of Gremlins and Gremlins 2.
Dante: They didn’t invite me. I didn’t even know about it until the other day.
Filmmaker: That seems in poor taste.
Dante: Maybe they just know how many of these things I’ve attended, and they figure, “Well, if we invite him, he won’t come.”
Filmmaker: My final question is, have you experienced The Movie Orgy DCP with an audience yet?
Dante: Jon Davison and I attended a screening of the DCP at The Academy.
Filmmaker: Oh, wonderful.
Dante: No, not wonderful. They were horrified. We had to leave, it just flopped. They were so offended. It was the wrong venue. First of all, no popcorn! The Academy Theater did run the new AGFA version of it, and it was moderately well-attended, but there were a lot of walkouts. They were particularly offended at various anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment moments. They were in bad taste, but that was our first flop.
Filmmaker: When did this occur?
Dante: Three months ago.
Filmmaker: Well, I’ll preach to the masses about the screenings in New York. I can’t imagine it’ll get the same reception.
Dante: Maybe that’s why they didn’t reach out. They heard about The Academy and were like, “Oh my God!”
