Screening Date: Thu. Dec. 5, 2024
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Pop’s Art Theater
Cost: $15
Run Time/Year/Country: 56min, 1970, USA
Director: Bruce Rubenstein, David Rubenstein, John Koerner

Co-presented by Pop’s Art Theater

In 1969 we decided to make a movie, a process much different then than it is now. We used a 16 mm camera, black and white film (because the movies we liked best, mostly European, were shot in black and white), a Nagra tape re-corder, glue and a splicer. We rented a house in Santa Barbara and stayed three months shooting the film, all living communally in the spirit of the times. Having all those wonderful toys to play with didn't help with the plotting. We mostly made it up as we went along. At some point we decided to call it a photo-skit, which still seems right. The plot (such as it is) and the protagonist's name were taken from the grail myth. A man named Percival gets a call in which he's told to go on a mysterious quest. His girl-friend-whose name was based on her actual personality, not a myth - doesn't understand.

Nevertheless, she does her best to help. Percy and his buddy wander around in various utopian settings, but in the end, they return to the city to contend with real-ity. The one truly epic scene, in which dozens of cowboys and Indians riding a herd of rented horses chase Percy across a mountain landscape, didn't make it into the film because the camera man forgot to take the lens cap off when he shot it. Technologically, things otherwise went remarkably well. Looking back now, it's clear that we thought youth and the 6os would last forever-even though it was 1970, Richard Nixon was President, and most of us were around 30. In that sense it is a permanent record of our illusions, which isn't a bad thing for a film to be.