You know how every non-fiction book in the last three years has been about the author doing one odd, life-disrupting thing for one full year and then writing a book about it? I'm reading one of those books a week for one full year and then writing a book about it. It's My Year Of Everything, and you're soaking in it. CONTACT: Dave Holmes/davedotcom@mac.com
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
In “A Year At The Movies,” Kevin Murphy seeks out unusual movie-theater experiences: bars with movie nights, a screen made of snow at the Montreal Ice Hotel, a trucker drive-in called the Giant Travel Center, to name a few. Read the book and see if you don’t want to start booking some flights. Or you could stay home and let Murphy, Mike Nelson and Bill Corbett bring an unusual movie-theater experience to you with their Rifftrax series. Murphy’s got your inner movie geek covered, is what I’m saying.
You had me wanting to have a beer and watch a movie at the Giant Travel Center. Which of your unusual theater experiences (the Ice Hotel, the tiny theater in Australia, etc.) would you do again?
Yeah, I left a large piece of my heart at the Empire Theater in Rartotonga. I was there on 9/11, about as far as home as I could imagine, and the people and the theater were a real comfort. I loved The Sun Pictures in Broome Western Australia, and I’d like to revisit with out the extreme case of jet-lag that I call Interdimensional Rocket-lag.
With “Rifftrax,” you are reinvigorating the moviegoing experience by injecting an element of live theater. How is the Fathom Events experiment coming? Did you see the Glenn Beck Christmas show? (If not, you should. It may be our new Rocky Horror.)
Rifftrax Live has been terrific, and I love doing it the way we do it for a couple of reasons. First, by beaming it to five hundred theaters we can get our show to small towns and small theaters where it would be really difficult to bring the actual stage show. Because we shoot it live and in a small theater it preserves the intimacy of a stage performance and we feel a connection. It’s like live TV, which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, only better because people are seeing it in crowds all over the map. Second, we don’t have to charge an arm and a leg for it, it’s just a little more expensive than a regular movie, and I’ve gotten a lot of thank-you notes just for this. It’s funny, it’s an old technology made new - think of the Radio Age, which was almost all live programming, and the first closed-circuit boxing events. And yet it fits with the New Media, because our audience is pretty well wired, yet many are not, and we can embrace them all.
