Nutshell: Lance Kramer, a friend of in-treatment Holm, asked him to put together a list of films. A different Holm-chosen flick runs every other week, alternating with an audience-chosen flick (like tonight). This is happening in the backyard of a house near Hawthorne Blvd. (1804 SE 38th), and Kramer accepts donations that will go to Holm’s living expenses. It’s low-key and chummy, and finally we have decent weather for it.
Wednesday the 18th was the first night. The Holm-chosen piece of cinema was 1968’s Dark of the Sun, where the embattled president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo hires mercenaries Rod Taylor and Jim Brown to retrieve diamonds from one part of the country and get those diamonds the hell back over to the president. This requires a train, men, weapons, cunning, the ability to dodge a chainsaw-wielding turncoat and more. And it turns out to be a real kick-ass action film, one I’d only barely heard about (because Film Score Monthly released a CD of Jacques Loussier’s emotional score) and that I hadn’t seen until that night.
Kramer started the film at dusk after the arrival of about 12 people (a few more trickled in later), who’d gathered on his lawn and around chairs that had been set up. Several of those chairs were prop chairs used in the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was just shot in Oregon; a friend of his had been on that film’s crew, and had salvaged the seats from a set as it was being dismantled. (I’d like to start the rumor now that Charlize Theron and/or Viggo Mortensen, depending on who you find more attractive, sat in one of those seats, but STARTING A FALSE RUMOR WOULD BE WRONG.) He projected the film onto the conveniently-sized back of a whitewashed garage abutting his backyard, with speakers sticking out of the grass giving a Surround-Sound sort of sensation. People broke out beer (it’s a BYOB event), settled in and viewed. (That should be stretched out: vieeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwed. Sounds more loungin’-around-and-gettin’-comfortable-l
After the film, Mike Russell and I visited, and geeked out over the film. We speculated that Dark of the Sun might be one of the movies Quentin Tarantino is using as inspiration for his Dirty Dozen-style World War II flick he wants to direct. If it isn’t, IT SHOULD BE. And walking-movie-encyclopedia Tarantino almost certainly knows of the film; it’s exactly up his alley.
Mike and I also danced to David Shire’s opening credits theme for The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, because we’re geeks like that. He played it from his iPhone.
Continued filmage will happen later with Night Two of the D.K. Holm film festival. *chugs the rest of the bottled Starbucks Frappuccino he bought when leaving Eugene last night, ’cause he’ll need the caffeine for tonight*
I’ll close with one piece of Out-Of-Context Theater!: I listened to the man who’d worked on The Road and the made-in-Oregon film adaptation Twilight (Stephanie Meyer’s novel about vampires trying to be good, non-kill-y vampires) tell a behind-the-scenes story about Twilight which I won’t repeat. I replied “Well, at least he’s getting laid.”