One
need not enter the fanciful but occasionally dangerous TIME MACHINE of H.G.
Wells to travel to the past.A far more
agreeable option, especially for horror movie fans weaned on the 1960s and
1970s films of such genre legends as Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter
Cushing, is a road trip to George Reis’s DRIVE-IN SUPER MONSTER-RAMA.This year’s MONSTER-RAMA was held, as always,
at the Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA, forty miles east of
Pittsburgh, on the Friday and Saturday following Labor Day weekend.This year’s event was the fourth annual
meeting of monster-movie fans and drive-in theatre devotees and, by most
accounts, was the best MONSTER-RAMA yet.Things got started around 8 PM each night, and went well beyond the
witching hour, usually ending somewhere between 4 and 4:30 AM.Each evening four full length feature films were
screened in their original 35mm and the stacked program also offered a
seemingly endless parade of devilishly entertaining vintage trailers, as well
as timeless drive-in concession ads that promoted everything from snack bar
treats (including “Chilly Dilly†pickles) to PIC anti-mosquito coils to a
“Drizzle-Guard†canopy that would enable one to enjoy drive-in films in the
rain.Unfortunately, we could have used
the latter item during Saturday night’s program, but the MONSTER-RAMA, without
question, attracted the steeliest of the hardcore fans.Only a relative few allowed the steady
drizzle to dampen their enthusiasm of the event.If anything, the MONSTER-RAMA offers too much
of a good thing, turning a pleasant night of movie-going into a test of
endurance as one must fight off the cold night air and cyclical bouts of
physical and mental fatigue as the clock hand spins well beyond 3 AM.Personally, I had succumbed to a number of
nostalgic pangs – and a few late-night stifled yawns - throughout the
weekend.As the family and I watched
Friday night’s fourth and closing film THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN through struggling,
sleepy eyes, I was suddenly twelve years old again, remembering (with odd fondness)
all the times I had forced myself to stay awake beyond 3 AM so I could catch
such tantalizingly titled old monster movies as SLAUGHTER OF THE VAMPIRES (1962)
or DR. BLOOD’S COFFIN (1961) on late night television.The DRIVE-IN SUPER MONSTER-RAMA offers, and delivers,
that sort of retro-experience.In
spades.
Last Sunday night I had the pleasure of attending The Big Picture- A Celebration of 75 Years
of 20th Century Fox at the famed Hollywood Bowl. Turner Classic
Movies host Robert Osborne did the honors, introducing us to various clips from
Fox’s great library.The LA Philharmonic
conductor David Newman, son of the legendary music composer Alfred Newman and a
noted composer himself, re-lived the magic of the great Fox film scores,
delighting the 15,000 or so fans that attended the two-hour event.There were plenty of screens constructed to
allow the audience to enjoy the film segments, though each clip was badly cued
with a blank screen and an anxious orchestra was forced to poise for an anxious
30 seconds in between scenes.I thought
the opening well-edited montage of some 175 movie clips was by far the best
part of the evening.
I can well imagine the pride David Newman must have
felt when conducting from the same music sheets his father had once
utilized.The scores ranged from was
from such classics as Zorro, How Green
Was My Valley, Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing to the world famous Fox
fanfare itself. There were also scores
of David Raksin for Laura, Jerry
Goldsmith’s Planet Of The Apes and
James Horner’s themes for Avatar.It was quite a treat to see a live orchestra
play such memorable music. Surprisingly, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s extensive
Fox legacy was mentioned only briefly in the concluding Sound Of Music salute.Fifteen minutes was devoted solely to the climax of Avatar, making for a not particularly well-proportioned sampling of
the Fox studio sound.In the aggregate,
my main complaint was that the evening should have been longer to accommodate
so many great Fox scores that were left unrepresented.
There were a number of ironies about the evening. No
one from Fox officially attended (or at least was publicly introduced).
Likewise, no former Fox celebrities or veteran employees were present to lend a
hand in toasting a studio that gave Hollywood its very voice through the
invention of sound-on film, otherwise known as Movietone.It would have made the evening far more
special if it had been arranged for someone from Fox to address the audience. One
of the other ironies is that the evening was indirectly sponsored through
Warner Brothers, which owns Turner Classic Movies, rather strange since Warner’s
own sound system Vitaphone was replaced by that of Fox. The Warners-Fox
relationship had another historic precedent when the two studios collaborated
on producing Irwin Allen’s 1974 blockbuster The
Towering Inferno, which marked the first production to be co-produced by
rival studios.On behalf of all retro
movie lovers, I’ll offer a “Here’s looking at you†salute to TCM for making the
effort to commemorate the 75th anniversary of this great studio.