See, if you’d been at Movie Clip Party #8 back in January of 2005, you might not have been so quick to disbelieve this.
Someone has posted the clip on YouTube, but the reveal works better when you start with the shot of Jeff Bridges listening.
“I seen her get caught in a cloudburst once”
Like I said, a GODDAMN NATIONAL TREASURE. Rest in peace, Harry.
From this year’s clip party.
(NYT Obit)
Movie Clip Party last night. Trying the Lightning Round on Vimeo. [link]
28 movie clips in 9 minutes. We’ll see if anyone flags it.
lonelysandwich (quoting Spiegelman):
I think what I’m saying is I don’t see AirPlay for video as a threat to the whole “point your remote at the TV and watch what’s there” sort of behavior and I want you to tell me what I’m missing.
Adam’s reply lovingly evokes bygone days of music store record bins and wire racks of VHS tapes for rent.
But to me the promise of AirPlay for video lies elsewhere.
For the first five years of my Movie Clip Party, people brought their clips on VHS, pre-cued to the start of the scenes they wanted to show. I crouched in the back of the room amid stacks of tapes, plugging them into the VCR one after the other, never sure quite what would happen when I pressed Play.
Then for a couple of years DVDs dragged the party to a crawl, as we slogged through unskippable studio logos, federal warnings, and animated menu sequences.
Now of course the whole affair is assembled and edited beforehand, curated in special sequence for maximum impact from clips contributed months in advance.
What excites me about AirPlay is how we’ll be able to use it to recapture some of the spontaneity of our early years, with clip parties edited on-the-fly in noisy, barcamp style, with guests with iPhones and iPods calling out “Me next! Me next!”
I agree with Spiegelman that the AirPlay ecosystem will never supplant the essential “watch what’s there” nature of TEE VEE the world over.
AirPlay is attractive instead to people who relate to their video through repetition and control. Who choose to watch THIS, NOW, without the step of wondering whether it’s even available to view.
And to people like me, who design parties around the impulse to share video socially. Who thrill at the notion of an AirPlay future, in which the friction all but fades away from a passionate, in-person exchange of: “You have got to see this. Check it out.”
Saturday night we held our 14th annual Movie Clip Party, where guests contribute short scenes and I stitch them together into an evening-long mini-festival.
Here I’ve posted this year’s Lightning Round (link to video), a quick-cut montage of scenes under 25 seconds in length, including contributions from @weselec and @maryamurphy. Also featured: the Ishtar quote that gives this tumblog its name.
It runs 8 minutes 14. Sue me.
For the length. Not the, um, intellectual property violations.
I do this thing offline, where a bunch of my friends come over and we watch three hours of movie clips we’ve collected during the year. Kind of a collaborative DIY That’s Entertainment. I’ve written a few posts about it in the past.
#14 is in two weeks. A couple of you are coming out this time. YAY.
If you’re in the Bay Area Saturday evening the 13th you could do worse than to hit me up for an invite.
God love Leah and Shane for liking this despite the sound being half missing (now fixed).
Lighting Round, 10th Edition (4min32sec)
Sometimes a clip party participant will pull a DVD out of their collection, ready to extract a clip they know will be terrific. An ESTABLISHED CLASSIC from cinematic history.
Until they watch it, and realize it will never work as a three-minute clip.
Case in point: the crop duster attack from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
…
An experienced clip party goer (in this case, my brother) will admit defeat at this point, and select 20 seconds of this iconic scene to submit instead for the Lightning Round, along with a choice moment from Tommy Boy.
Clip Party #14 coming up, November 13. Clips due October 6. Mark those calendars, them that wants in.
Lighting Round, 10th Edition (4min32sec)
Sometimes a clip party participant will pull a DVD out of their collection, ready to extract a clip they know will be terrific. An ESTABLISHED CLASSIC from cinematic history.
Until they watch it, and realize it will never work as a three-minute clip.
Case in point: the crop duster attack from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
For one thing, the sequence is too long, if you include Cary Grant getting off the bus, waiting, wondering whether the person across the road is the person he is supposed to meet, waiting, hearing and seeing the plane in the distance, waiting, and the realizing THIS FUCKING PLANE IS HEADING STRAIGHT AT ME.
In truth, you need much more than even that, because for the scene to really work you need to know why this well-dressed urbanite is on this lonely rural road to begin with. I.e. to say, THE STAKES. Otherwise it’s just shots of a guy running from a plane intercut with shots of the same guy falling down in a rear-screen projection room back in Hollywood.
The sequence works because it is an ambush of both Roger Thornhill (Grant) and the audience’s expectations. Divorced from its setup, the scene just falls flat.
An experienced clip party goer (in this case, my brother) will admit defeat at this point, and select 20 seconds of this iconic scene to submit instead for the Lightning Round, along with a choice moment from Tommy Boy.
Lighting Round, 9th Edition
At 2 minutes 50 seconds, our shortest Lightning Round montage.
The Pepe (Best Clip Under 60 Seconds) - 13th Edition
I set a time limit—three minutes per clip—and of course people want to submit clips that run 3:04, or 3:17, or 3 MINUTES FUCKING 42. In the early years of the party the time limit was five minutes, and people would routinely try to stretch scenes out to more than six-and-a-half.
The party can survive with a couple of clips that push beyond the three-minute mark, but it’s best when we can vary the rhythm with clips of different lengths.
We have the Lightning Round for clips shorter than 25 seconds. Clips slightly longer are screened independently, and become eligible for The Pepe¹.
This year’s winner was my favorite scene of the entire night, and also first runner-up for Audience Award. I enjoy watching it multiple times in a row.
Previous winners:
12th Edition: BARFLY the angels are everywhere
11th Edition: THE CALAMARI WRESTLER training sequence
10th Edition: THE SQUID & THE WHALE a game of ping pong
9th Edition: THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS Who is this man?
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¹The award is named after the Mexican Muppet prawn, featured in a clip I contributed myself in year 8 (link to video)
