Sub Rosa Drive-In Theater

This past season was an interesting experiment. How do you take a few hundred bucks and create a small community around a series of cult movies? We found out after a couple of failures, financial roadblocks and a dick in Somersworth who tried to bring us down because, damn it! People should have to pay to be entertained! So we all had a great time and hope you did, too. But seeing as how this is New Hampshire, the weather is becoming our enemy and the last couple of shows were really cold. So that’s it for this year, we’re shuttering this operation. There may be some indoor shows but nothing is set in stone, just a few ideas. If things come through for us, we’ll let you know all the details.

See you next year!

Sub Rosa cohort, Mike Merrigan passed this link along which is full of great tips that apply to our trunk-bourne show and some that apply to actual drive in theaters. Either way, it’s a fun read.

http://www.moviesbystarlight.com/drive-in-tips.htm

In case you’d forgotten, The Sub Rosa Drive-In resumes it’s series tomorrow night after postponing last week’s show due to rain. The show is John Carpenters “rich people are weird, man” science fiction actioner, They Live, starring Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David.

You can find us out back at the Simply Green station at 547 Central Avenue in Dover at 9pm. Tune into 90.3 FM for audio. Also, consider showing up early as we’ll be broadcasting some sweet tunes and there will be mingling. Come meet your fellow Sub Rosa attendees as well as Larry and I.

And to whomever called Simply Green last time to try and rat us out to them: Grow up. They’ve been very generous in permitting us to be there.

As usual, donations are always welcome. We have still have a big schedule on the horizon leading right up to October and your continued support makes sure that we get to show the movies.

Ever since our traumatic run-in with licensing issues in the wake of some downright irresponsible comments made to the papers about licensing and permission, we’ve been doing our best to make sure that our shows are by the book and that the people with the licenses are being paid. However, we hit a snag when we came up on some titles that Swank Motion Pictures didn’t have licenses for. They made it sound like we had some kind of exclusive deal with them since they more or less had our backs to the wall in the licensing department. This is not the case, of course, and pictures that they don’t license aren’t really any of their business. Case in point, the upcoming showing of the heavy metal horror movie, Black Roses, a real turkey that is nothing but good laughs and cheesy metal. It’s important that we do this right, though, if our little movement is going to gain any kind of traction, and with this in mind I contacted the fellas at Synapse Films who last released Black Roses on DVD. They contacted the license holder for the movie who then promptly granted us permission to show the movie at no cost. I only wish that they would have told me who owned the license so that I could thank them, myself.

So big ups to Synapse Films and big ups to whomever owns the rights to Black Roses. We’ve been getting shaken down at great expense to show some of these movies and I hope this screening generates some interest in Synapse, who also released John Fasano’s other kickass metal horror movie, Rock N’ Roll Nightmare (starring the one and only Jon Mikl Thor). Black Roses screens August 14th. See you there!

Once again, we’ve been screwed by nature’s cruel will. Apart from the fact that it seems like it has rained through 80% of the summer, the worst of it all tends to land on our Friday nights. So like our first show, where I prematurely called it off based on the forecast, I called the show off last night because it was supposed to be torrential downpours all day and then thunderstorms all night and by 6 when I said that I would make the call, it was still looking that way.

Can you imagine how angry I was when, at 8ish, the sunset was visible through considerable gaps in the clouds and the water on the ground started to dry up?

So we’ll do this this coming Friday, the 7th at Simply Green at the same time, 9pm.  See you there.

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 7/1/09! In just 12 hours we have received nearly $250! The show of support that we have received from you guys is massive and we’re at a loss for words. We’re still short of our goal by $800. If you have not donated, please consider it. A small contribution will go a long way.

As nice as it was to have the attention from the local papers, it was only a matter of time before it brought us some bad luck. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Certain words in quote marks that made me uncomfortable made the movie license holders even more uncomfortable. I received an email today from a company that manages the non-theatrical exhibition licenses (i.e. what we’re doing) and they strongly suggest that we play by the rules. Nobody made any threats, no one is shutting this down before it starts rolling, but with our suddenly elevated status and readily accessible details about the shows, we’re operating out in the open. Suddenly, there are some staggering costs associated with putting on these shows and we won’t be able to do it without your help. Non-theatrical licensing is not prohibitively expensive, but when you have as many shows scheduled as we do, costs add up quickly. We may  need to trim the schedule to make this more affordable.

This has the potential to shut us down before we even get started. With so many of you just finding us now and emailing us to tell us how excited you are for it, it would suck if we weren’t even able to go much further. Please help us continue by donating what you can. We had a great time and we hope you have a great time. Make sure that we can continue providing the good times to the seacoast.

UPDATE! Chalupa raises a good point in the comments section. I didn’t point out the cost of these movies. It’s a variable price tag from picture to picture. Depending on what it is, and I’m still waiting on the total quote from the company, they range from $100 to $350. Each picture, including Pump Up The Volume from last Friday will cost $100. We need to raise at least $1100.

I’m also being told that the link I had formerly posted to donate is broken. Please use this one and these instructions:

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/send_money

Specify info@subrosadrivein.com and click on the Personal tab. Then select Gift and submit your donation.

Tonight’s show has moved, folks. We blew our cover when we tried to get last minute permission and while we turned down, for the moment it was only because it was on such short notice. Next week’s show might be different.  For now, however, we are NOT showing at Certified Parts Warehouse.  We will be elsewhere.  I have sent out an email detailing the new location.  It’s still in Dover, right up the street on Central Ave. Check your inboxes.

Like the title says, it’s raining and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop tonight for the show so we’re postponing the screening until next week. Friday the 26th, to be exact. This gives you another week to get on the mailing list as there will be another announcement next week for any newcomes in the meantime. The present location was disclosed already and probably won’t change but for anyone who signs up in the next week, you’ll get to find out.

You know how it goes with weather in New England. I’ll spare you the cliched schtick, but meteorologists are uniformly forecasting rain for Friday. We’re not exactly calling it off, because who knows what the evening will be like, but we will issue an email to everyone on the mailing list with the final word whether or not we postpone the show.