Begun in 1968, budding filmmaker Joe Dante envisioned The Movie Orgy as an expression of riotous, rebellious, cinematic fun, and a study of the camp curios of 1950s American culture. Assembled from more than a hundred feature films, television shows, commercials, and educational films, the gargantuan project swelled to a 7-hour found footage epic, touring university campuses across America. Buried in its cans for decades, it was unearthed by Dante in the early 2000s, digitized, and once more delights audiences at rare screenings at festivals across the U.S. and abroad. This presentation will recount the unique history of The Movie Orgy, and the footage within it, while drawing attention to issues of copyright, projector-based live performance, digitization, and the problems surrounding the archiving, preservation and screening of such a complex work.
