Film
Volume 15, Issue 75
Published October 18th, 2008
Published October 18th, 2008
Techni-color Dreams
Cinematheque hosts showcase of Scopitone rarities
Arguably the most spectacularly cool pop-culture artifact of the swingin’ go-go 1960s, Scopitones sometimes elude even the most “with-it” retro hipsters. There are multiple reasons for the esoteric, forgotten status of Scopitones, which were outlandish, garishly Technicolor 16mm “music videos” that played in a rear-projection, coin-operated jukebox device from France.
Only interested in big names like the Beatles or the Stones, rock snobs have historically shown disdain toward the misfit Scopitone roster of second-string American and French pop stars. Some Scopitones of relatively more famous songs (like Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots…”) have occasionally turned up on VH1, but the wildest and most imaginative of these films mostly go willfully ignored by mass media. With ambiguous rights ownership clouding official distribution, the only opportunity to witness these audiovisual rarities is on the Internet or bootleg DVD-R/VHS, or if some private collector holds a public screening. One such collector is Portland, Oregon’s Dennis Nyback. He’s bringing three-dozen of his own Scopitone prints from his archives at Marylhurst University to the Cinematheque’s first-ever Scopitone showcase.
Some of the songs visualized in Scopitones are actually so obscure that they were never pressed to vinyl records. One such Scopitone-exclusive tune, “Web of Love” by Joi Lansing, is the soundtrack to one of the most revered Scopitones. In “Web of Love,” chesty B-movie starlet Lansing escapes both a cannibal stew and a slithering cobra man, only to get her golden-bikini-clad bod caught in a giant spider web, while jungle girls in red-fringe short-shorts execute logic-defying dance moves around her. Because the Scopitone jukeboxes were typically located in bars, they baited adult male audiences with a gratuitous cheesecake pin-up aesthetic that was a bit too racy for 1960s commercial television, further sinking Scopitones into the long-term cultural underground.
That the prints were struck on an unusual magnetic-sound 16mm format didn’t help their ongoing exposure either. Scopitones were so deeply buried after their late-1960s death that Nyback, who started seriously collecting film prints in 1979, only first encountered the forgotten medium in 1990. He and a kindred movie collector named Jack Sevenson were then looking for a 16mm magnetic-sound projector. The guy with the projector demonstrated how to load it with, as it happened, a Scopitone of “Queen of the House,” Jody Miller’s minor hit, sung to the tune of “King of the Road.”
“Jack and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” Nyback says in a recent phone interview. “It was like this snapshot of 1964 and this woman singing about, well, her life — being a wife in her house. As she sings, it cuts to these three dancing girls, each in front of a stove, and they’re wearing these sort of fetish French maid outfits. They’re each doing this dance, bending over to look in the oven. And then it cuts back to Jody Miller singing. And then the dancing girls are dancing with dust mops, kind of like stripper poles. There are maybe two generations of women in America who have no idea why there was a feminist movement. They all need to see ‘Queen of the House’.”
Nyback is particularly fascinated with Scopitones’ strange sociological implications, which can get overshadowed by the films’ over-the-top production design. The conceptual sets and costumes and choreography resemble displaced random dream fragments.
“They’re nuts!” says Nyback, who’ll also show his collection of bizarre WWII-era films created for the U.S. government by Dr. Seuss. “In terms of design, it seemed like they were starting with color before anything else, with a very ad hoc, stuck-together approach. Scopitones were meant to be seen on a screen about as big as a freezer door on the top of a refrigerator. And they were [designed] to catch the eye of someone 20 feet away around a bar, so that they’d want to come over and put money into the machine. When you actually blow them up to the big screen, they go beyond their normal garishness to become something in a completely different realm.”
The Dark Side of Dr. Seuss
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque
At 7:30 p.m. Friday, October 10
Scopitone-A-Go-Go HHHH
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque
At 9:30 p.m. Friday, October 10
Only interested in big names like the Beatles or the Stones, rock snobs have historically shown disdain toward the misfit Scopitone roster of second-string American and French pop stars. Some Scopitones of relatively more famous songs (like Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots…”) have occasionally turned up on VH1, but the wildest and most imaginative of these films mostly go willfully ignored by mass media. With ambiguous rights ownership clouding official distribution, the only opportunity to witness these audiovisual rarities is on the Internet or bootleg DVD-R/VHS, or if some private collector holds a public screening. One such collector is Portland, Oregon’s Dennis Nyback. He’s bringing three-dozen of his own Scopitone prints from his archives at Marylhurst University to the Cinematheque’s first-ever Scopitone showcase.
Some of the songs visualized in Scopitones are actually so obscure that they were never pressed to vinyl records. One such Scopitone-exclusive tune, “Web of Love” by Joi Lansing, is the soundtrack to one of the most revered Scopitones. In “Web of Love,” chesty B-movie starlet Lansing escapes both a cannibal stew and a slithering cobra man, only to get her golden-bikini-clad bod caught in a giant spider web, while jungle girls in red-fringe short-shorts execute logic-defying dance moves around her. Because the Scopitone jukeboxes were typically located in bars, they baited adult male audiences with a gratuitous cheesecake pin-up aesthetic that was a bit too racy for 1960s commercial television, further sinking Scopitones into the long-term cultural underground.
That the prints were struck on an unusual magnetic-sound 16mm format didn’t help their ongoing exposure either. Scopitones were so deeply buried after their late-1960s death that Nyback, who started seriously collecting film prints in 1979, only first encountered the forgotten medium in 1990. He and a kindred movie collector named Jack Sevenson were then looking for a 16mm magnetic-sound projector. The guy with the projector demonstrated how to load it with, as it happened, a Scopitone of “Queen of the House,” Jody Miller’s minor hit, sung to the tune of “King of the Road.”
“Jack and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” Nyback says in a recent phone interview. “It was like this snapshot of 1964 and this woman singing about, well, her life — being a wife in her house. As she sings, it cuts to these three dancing girls, each in front of a stove, and they’re wearing these sort of fetish French maid outfits. They’re each doing this dance, bending over to look in the oven. And then it cuts back to Jody Miller singing. And then the dancing girls are dancing with dust mops, kind of like stripper poles. There are maybe two generations of women in America who have no idea why there was a feminist movement. They all need to see ‘Queen of the House’.”
Nyback is particularly fascinated with Scopitones’ strange sociological implications, which can get overshadowed by the films’ over-the-top production design. The conceptual sets and costumes and choreography resemble displaced random dream fragments.
“They’re nuts!” says Nyback, who’ll also show his collection of bizarre WWII-era films created for the U.S. government by Dr. Seuss. “In terms of design, it seemed like they were starting with color before anything else, with a very ad hoc, stuck-together approach. Scopitones were meant to be seen on a screen about as big as a freezer door on the top of a refrigerator. And they were [designed] to catch the eye of someone 20 feet away around a bar, so that they’d want to come over and put money into the machine. When you actually blow them up to the big screen, they go beyond their normal garishness to become something in a completely different realm.”
The Dark Side of Dr. Seuss
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque
At 7:30 p.m. Friday, October 10
Scopitone-A-Go-Go HHHH
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque
At 9:30 p.m. Friday, October 10
