Oak Street Films

Isn’t it wonderful to know that we don’t have to make our own moral judgments thanks to a gaggle of loons in Florida who want to do it for us? Via Robin Bougie:

Nearly 300 members of the Anglican Christ Church in Jacksonville, Florida gathered on Sunday, Oct. 19th 2008 for an unusual ceremony. As the congregation cheered, more than 100 reels of classic porn and sexploitation films were thrown into a pile, ritually torched, and then hosed down with water from a Jacksonville Fire and Rescue truck blessed by the priest.

“Obviously, we knew the right thing to do would be to destroy it, and not let it ever be out on the market”, pastor Mark Eldredge later told a reporter.

The church came into possession of the vintage film canisters when they purchased the 13-acre “Playtime Drive-In” for $1.4 million after the 60-year-old theater folded in 2007. The flock had found the historic stash above the concession stand, and some reels were even hidden in the walls. They did not watch any of the films, nor did they record the names of the movies they destroyed, some of which may have been the only remaining prints — and are now lost forever.

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There are a lot of things I want to write about, but I’m in the midst of a particularly busy–and stressful–week. I’ve been recovering from the shock of a very disappointing turnout at the shows the other night (though the reaction to the films on the part those who did attend could not have been better or more satisfying), and am simultaneously preparing finally to begin work on Hell Is Other People even as I scramble to find some kind of way to pay my landlord and avoid sudden homelessness.

Stay tuned. Or in more medium-appropriate terms, don’t delete those bookmarks from your browser (or the feed from your reader). I’ll be right back.

Am I the only one who is–perhaps somewhat irrationally, but perhaps not–still bothered when his work is referred to as “a video”? Does anyone other than me bristle at the mention of the word “videographer”?

This is an old discussion; we’ve been wondering what we should call cinematic work produced on video since doing so first became technologically feasible decades ago, and it has especially been a common topic of discussion in the few short years since the “digital revolution” began incrementally to make electronic cinema a more “respectable” means with which to approach the medium. In spite of all the talk, however, it seems we’re no closer than we’ve ever been to arriving at any sort of satisfactory consensus.

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I’m hoping this third-generation re-design of the site will answer some of the more nagging, longstanding deficiencies of its previous iterations. One of the biggest problems has been the lack of content relating to the movies I make to earn a living (as opposed to the movies I make purely out of my love for Auntie Kino); it’s hard to make an impression on potential clients, collaborators, or contractors when there’s nothing on one’s Web site which relates directly to the the type of work a client might want to talk about. So I’ve finally broken down and decided to build a page called services as part of a new effort to remedy that problem.

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