Join us Friday, the 31st at 9:00pm sharp for a screening of the John Carpenter classic, They Live. By this point in the 80’s, of the original four horror movie dynamos, Romero, Hooper, Craven and Carpenter, John Carpenter was the only one among the bunch still injecting his features with a strong dose of social examination. They Live runs wild with the idea that rich people are weird and satirizes then contemporary American culture by assuming that the only way to explain the upper class disconnect is that they’re aliens and the only way to explain the middle class lethargy was to assume that our minds are being controlled by the alien upper class. And if the darkly comedic nature of the movie dosn’t sell you on it, immediately, hey! It stars Rowdy Roddy Piper!
George Nada is a homeless day laborer in Los Angeles who takes up in one of the local hoovervilles while he looks for work. Through sheer bad luck he finds his way into a street level resistance group that uses a pair of specialized sunglasses that cut through the illusion of daily life to reveal a world saturated in mind control devices and subliminal messages on everything. To make matters worse, the glasses also reveal a big portion of the population to be a horrific race of aliens that are running everything.
They Live is a great movie with a surprisingly able performance by Piper. This is the movie that the South Park episode, Cripple Fight, reproduced the epic Jimmy/Timmy fight from and if you’ve ever heard someone say they’re here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, this is probably where they heard it.
As if Sub Rosa couldn’t possibly be any cooler, Larry delivered a little news to me that just had to go up here.
I’ve made our appreciation of Simply Green Biofuels and their willingness to host us tonight very well known. Finding permission to be somewhere was our last real step in making this a successful show and for a while it looked like we weren’t going to get that permission anywhere. But these guys stepped up to the plate and that’s huge.
One of the biggest problems of running this show is finding an energy source that is both portable and powerful enough to support the rather hefty demands of the projector. Being the advocates of sustainable energy resources that they are, Joel at Simply Green told Larry that tonight’s energy, provided on the house by Simply Green, is sourced from solar cells. Pretty sweet, no?
If you take a look around, other GDIs are using deep cycle batteries, gas powered generators or are plugging into wall outlets that powered by fossil fuels. Our plugging into solar powered electricity, potentially, makes us, The Sub Rosa Drive-In, the first Green Guerilla Drive-In! Thanks Simply Green! Not only do you support a healthy environment but you also support your community. In turn, you, the community, ought to support Simply Green.
So a couple of weeks back, we were politely asked by the Rollinsford Police to pack up and project elsewhere, which left us in a strange position. While the thrill of hiding out and watching a movie on the sly is good stuff, the likelihood that we would be shut down again mid-movie was pretty high. So rather than get together to watch half a movie that we’re paying out the nose for, the decision was made to go to great lengths to find a place to project with permission. And let me tell you something about that: It’s extremely hard to find someone willing to let us. It was extremely frustrating being told no time and time again. But we got lucky and rather than keep the location secret like we were doing all along, I’m just going to post it up front here.
Simply Green Biofuels, a company that provides cleaner, sustainable alternatives to heating and diesel fuels has generously made their station and “congreenience store” available to us tomorrow night for our screening of The Warriors. To find us come to this address, we will be out back:
547 Central Ave.
Dover, NH
9:00pm
What this means to you:
The police will not break this up.
We will be able to watch the entire movie.
They’re also allowing us to use their electricity, which means no dead batteries and no generator to cause an obnoxious hum under the audio track.
I’ll be bringing a different DVD player, as well. One that will let us resume the movie should there be an interruption.
With this special version of The Warriors that we will be screening, I feel like I need to set everyone’s expectations appropriately. This is not an official release. This is what is called a Fanedit. It was assembled by some dude in his bedroom with a cracked copy of Final Cut Pro, no doubt. The regular feature is sourced from a DVD and looks outstanding, but the footage source for the scenes only available on TV are from a dodgy source, most likely a VHS bootleg and there is a noticeable difference in picture quality. Many of you will have, no doubt, seen The Warriors a bunch of times however I am almost certain that few of you have seen this version. It’s pretty cool.
The weather forecast for tomorrow is holding steady with clouds at night but no rain at this point. So we’ll keep you up to date. If there is a change and it looks like it’ll rain, we’ll let you know here and in the newsletter and the show will be postponed until next Friday, but everything is go at this point.
UPDATE! I have managed to track down a very special, very rare version of The Warriors for the show on the 17th. We will be screening an extended cut of the movie that combines all footage from the theatrical cut, the director’s cut and the rarely seen TV cut. This will be a unique opportunity. Don’t miss it!
Join us on Friday the 17th, 9:00pm sharp for a screening of one of the greatest cult movies of all time! I absolutely love The Warriors. It’s an original through and through. Andrew Laszlo’s night time photography of New York City is unrivalled and the brutal action is shot like dime store Peckinpah. What’s more, it’s packed to the rafters with outstanding characters and dialog. Sampled extensively by hardcore bands and just about everyone on Bad Boy Records. Based loosely on a novel by Sol Yurick which is, in turn, based on Xenophon’s Anabasis.
Cyrus, leader of the Grammercy Riffs, the biggest gang in New York City, is assassinated during a speech about uniting the city’s gangs and taking over. Small time gangbangers, The Warriors, from Coney Island get the blame even though they didn’t do it and they’ll spend the rest of the night running frantically from every colorful crew in the city just to make it back to their home turf.
Show starts at 9:00pm. Be on the lookout for the email that tells you where we’ll be screening.
Hey, gang. We had a great turn out tonight! Around 8:30, the convoy of Sub Rosa supporters, ready for a night of commie smashing action rolled in and a little after 9, we kicked off the show. Everything was going alright until the dramatic turn in the second act as the Wolverines start to fight back. Then I went out to move the generator and all hell broke loose.
I assure you, folks, we’ll get to watch an entire movie at the next show.
We’re clearly still working the bugs out of the process. The trailer reel went on a little too long and the proximity of the generator to the FM transmitter was to blame for that awful hum under the audio. The fact that it was foggy accounted for the picture being obscured by nearby lights. Had there been no moisture in the air to reflect off of, the picture would have been great. Had I not knocked the cable out of the generator, the whole system wouldn’t have come down. The problem, for those of you wondering, is that the DVD player is an antiquated cheap-o with no buttons other than play, stop and eject on the face of the machine. The remote was long gone. Starting over would have meant watching the movie from beginning to end. We were about to break for an intermission while Cheyenne, who lives right nearby, ran home to get a backup player.
That’s when the cops showed up. So you choose. It was either my own ineptitude or the inevitability of the po-po dropping by that closed us down. Just as the movie was getting good. Since we won’t be going back there, I can now tell you all where we were: behind the Bed, Bath and Beyond building (formerly Service Merchandise) on Central Avenue in Dover. I don’t know who called the cops but it could have been any of the cars that drove through while we were watching the movie. Regardless, Rollinsford’s finest couldn’t have been cooler about it. We were trespassing, they asked us nicely to leave. You all beat it in an orderly fashion. Thanks for your cooperation.
I hope no one feels let down. We were having a grand old time and the next show is still on in two weeks. We have a couple of spots that are interested in actually hosting us so the police won’t be an issue next time. We also pulled down enough in donations to afford They Live in a month. Thank you guys so, so much. We’ll see you at the next show in two weeks. The Warriors. A very special, very rare version of The Warriors.
Hey, gang. I just want to make it really clear that if you use our contact form to email us and ask where the show is, PLEASE include your email address in the email field so I know who to reply to. I’ve been getting a lot of messages from people asking for details but no one ever provides an email address to respond to.
You may have an idea of what’s been going on lately but in the interest of full disclosure here’s the deal in a nutshell:
Foster’s Daily Democrat ran a front page article about us back on Monday, which was awesome. It made so many of you aware of us and your excitement and support was so unexpected and thrilling. However, Dan Jacobitz of Somersworth business, Video Under The Stars, took great exception to what we’re doing and wrote to the paper calling us a bunch of names. He also called Swank Motion Pictures to rat us out.
Swank, whom I’ve had a relationship with in the past, emailed me to ask what I thought I was doing. Suddenly, flying under the radar was no longer an option, Larry and I were way out in the open. Our backs to the wall, we had no choice but to work out a deal with Swank to license our movies.
Last week’s showing of Pump Up The Volume is now officially licensed. We paid the fee for that. We also paid the fee for tomorrow’s Red Dawn show and The Warriors in two weeks. License fees for us are $100 a piece. Many of you came to our aid to help us out with donations and we cannot possibly thank you enough. For that we’re going to bring you the best possible guerilla drive-in that we can. We’re still accepting donations for future shows so please give what you can, whatever you think that we’re worth and we’ll keep this rolling for as long as the money lasts or as long as the city of Dover will tolerate us. Whichever comes first.
