captainsblog | Dante's Inferno (Reply)

I often write here about earworms. Today, though, I turn to their even more accursed little cousin, the quotebug.

Over 48-plus years of life and 20-plus years of marriage, your brain is bound to accumulate toss-off lines that you and your family use, way too often and in ways nobody understands other than you. They have many sources; primordially, many come from what I call the "Mom List," that compendium of parental proverbs which I swore I'd never say to my own child and have spent most of the past sixteen years, what else?, saying to my own child. Some have broad pop-culture backgrounds, in the way "where's the beef?" infected the lexicon in the 1980s. One level away from that (up or down, I'm not sure) are more sophisticated references I know some of you share, such as Monty Python's "intercourse the penguin!" A few are unique to a time and place that Eleanor and I shared, such as saying "Ex-cuuuuuuse me! Ex-CUUUUUUse MEEEEE!" in the bitchiest of ways, as a herd of ballplayer wives/girlfriends did to us when we had the best seats of our lives at a baseball game.

Then there are the ones that come out of nowhere, and take on stories of their own you never knew before.

Earlier today, as I tried to get back to sleep, the cat was being annoyingly cuddly, hogging bedspace and insisting on all kind of attention. I responded, as I have more than once, with a bad old B-movie line:

"Don't crowd me, Joe."

That line's been burned into my brain for over 30 years, but this morning, for the first time, I tried to find out exactly where it came from in the world of cinema. I certainly didn't expect it to have much of a pedigree, because I remembered where I heard it cinematically for the first and last time.

Orientation Week, August 1977. A ton of bonding and relaxing activities with several thousand of our new freshman friends, almost every one of them centered around beer. It seems shocking looking back at it, just how encouraging colleges were of these levels of consumption. The drinking age was still 18, but I, along with at least a quarter of the entering class, was still 17 or even younger at that point. Nobody had fake IDs because nobody ever asked for IDs. You just drank.

This particular bacchanalia took place in the open field set between the six redbrick 1950s dormitories which most freshmen, and only freshmen, called home. Since the grass was quickly destroyed by pickup football games, we called it the Dust Bowl. The outer wall of the adjacent student union served as the projection space for this event's midnight movie, which had no plot to speak of but was just clips of bad B-movie scenes with cliched lines to laugh at, the most memorable of which turned out to be, "Don't crowd me, Joe."

I doubt if a month of my life has gone by without thinking that line at least once- in traffic, a grocery aisle, or, as today, when surrounded by a mooching animal. I may have even googled (or alta-vista'd, in a previous realm) in an effort to source the quote, without success, until today:

SPEED CRAZY 1959
U.S. film. "From juke-joint to dragstrip, it's the livin' end." A hot headed delinquent hot rodder calls all the shots! You either listen...or else! Rockabilly Slick Slavin sings "Speed Crazy" and "Ghost Town Rock." Cool soda shop jitterbug and swing dancing. Brett Halsey, Yvonne Lime. Don't crowd me, Joe. Yvonne Lime's last movie. Speed Crazy!

So that's the source, but it's not the compilation I saw. Yep, found that, too:

In 1972, my first year of college, I saw a great "film" called SON OF MOVIE ORGY. It was a two-hour long mess of a montage, consisting of clips from public domain features like REEFER MADNESS, U.S. Army training films, old TV commercials, and trailers for bizarre flicks like THE SHOEMAKER AND THE ELVES. The juxtaposition of the mainstream stuff with the titillating stuff made it quite a shock to the senses, and I still recall parts of it vividly to this day. This was probably part of Joe Dante's MOVIE ORGY condensed for the Midnight College Movie circuit? Who knew? Good stuff, anyway! Sponsored by Budweiser Beer, if I recall.

Schlitz beer, as it turns out, but waitaminute. Joe DANTE?

Well, yeah. The same Joe Dante who just exhibited the full version of this college film school project, for the first time in ages, in Los Angeles. Four nights ago:

April 23, 2008
Joe Dante Whips Out 1968 Movie Orgy

Posted by Peter Debruge:
At a time when most rep houses seem to be in hot water, Los Angeles’ New Beverly packed ’em in last night for the finale of “Dante’s Inferno,” two weeks of forgotten classics guest programmed by Joe Dante.

While many of the director's picks were obscure, none could compete with “The Movie Orgy,” a marathon 4½-hour clip show Dante first assembled in 1968 with Jon Davison, then put on ice for nearly four decades.

Understand, The Movie Orgy isn’t a proper movie but an exercise in extreme film geekdom, as Dante and Davison spliced 16mm trailers, clips, newsreel footage, bloopers and old TV shows together to form a semi-linear commentary on/reaction against the time. Over the years, the project has earned a borderline apocryphal reputation, called by some the “Rosetta Stone” of Dante’s career — a glimpse deep into the filmmaker’s id — and it’s a testament to the city’s cult film scene that so many stayed for the entire show.

That Variety piece goes on to reference Speed Crazy, as well as a number of other MST3K-worthy bombs that he sampled in this massive piece, all long before Dante's own film career had even begun.

Neither he nor the beer company ever got permissions for the clips that were used, so sadly, this classic is not available on Netflix. Nor is Speed Crazy itself, dammit.

Don't crowd my queue, Joe.