How do you salute Seattle’s longest running independent movie theater? With an equally unique (and lengthy) cinematic experience! Long before the existence of YouTube and the internet mash-up video, Joe Dante and Jon Davison created the ancestor of all mash-ups, THE MOVIE ORGY, a madman’s feast of B&W glory ripped from innumerable 16mm reels of feature films, television shows, advertisements, public service pieces, and government-issue military recruitment footage. Emanating from a cultural consciousness with “one foot in space and the other on the brink of nuclear destruction,” as one of the B-movie scientists intones, THE MOVIE ORGY holds nothing back. Sci-fi films from the 50’s feature prominently, but when one of the advertisements is for cereal box collectable cards featuring significant US military weaponry, it’s hard to parse fiction from the facts.

While being in an altered state might enhance aspects of the MOVIE ORGY, the experience alone is more than sufficiently mind-bending.

THE MOVIE ORGY plays on this malleability of narrative perception: it’s a mistake, almost, to name the films clipped, because it narrows the imagination to specific plot trajectories. To say you’re watching the best bits of ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN or THE BEGINNING OF THE END intersected with advertisements for Bufferin and segments from Andy’s Gang cannot possibly begin to describe the effect of Dante and Davison’s work. The true MOVIE ORGY has no final shape, as the pair used to splice it live like visual DJs. Davison and Dante took the original 8 hour MOVIE ORGY on the road back in the late 60’s, showing it at college campuses in a tour sponsored by Schlitz Beer and spawning a cult viewership. The “short” experience, a (mere) 4.5 hours of unmitigated, enthusiastic cognitive dissonance spun together in an inexplicably seamless narrative whorl, was edited down and committed to digital video by Dante much later.

While being in an altered state might enhance aspects of the MOVIE ORGY, the experience alone is more than sufficiently mind-bending. The full-length MOVIE ORGY was made to be walked out on. You can exit the theater and re-enter it at any time, picking up on the film right where you left off. It’s simultaneously profound social commentary, wonderfully self-indulgent, and seriously fun.

THE MOVIE ORGY screens for free by necessity, owing to the many instances of copyright infringement occurring and reoccurring throughout its mind-melting time-warp of a narrative. In the increasingly homogenized blockbuster-friendly culture of modern movie-going, it’s a magnificently weird testament to both the joy of movies and live performances.