Erich Scholz was in bed when the idea came to him. That it was not a very practical idea was not especially obvious at the time. In retrospect, says Scholz, that turned out be an advantage.
“It gave me a mission, ironically,” says Scholz, an intelligent, well-spoken, 30-something who lives in Little Forest Hills. “It’s almost as if I was called to do it.”
Scholz’s calling is the Dallas Cinemania Film Society, which holds monthly screenings of rare or unusual — or just plain odd — films at the Angelika in Mockingbird Station. The society’s reason for being, Scholz says, is to show movies that no one has seen in years or that may never have been shown the way the director intended.
These are usually not commercial films, and they aren’t even the stuff that shows up on the art house circuit. Often, they are so rare there aren’t DVD versions. These are movies that only a film buff could love, cult favorites like “Invasion of the Bee Girls”, “Blood Feast” and “Holy Mountain”. Even the more conventional pictures have asterisks next to their names: Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” and the Marlon Brando western, “One-Eyed Jacks”.
Which is why the society’s nine months of existence have been such a challenge. These days, the movie business, and especially the distribution part of it, doesn’t much care about film buffs or rare and unusual movies. It is set up to distribute movies — commercial and artsy — to the chains that own megaplexes, and not to a once-a-month series run by a guy who does production graphics for an ad agency. (This is also one important reason why the Lakewood and Casa Linda theaters are dark, but that’s a column for another day.)
The distributors expect minimums — in rental fees, in the number of dates played — and there is no way that Scholz can make those minimums playing to 50 people one night a month. This is something he didn’t know when he started to line up the society’s Halloween 2008 debut, “Zombi 2”, a bloody 1979 Italian effort about zombies on a tropical island starring Tisa Farrow, Mia’s sister. “I kind of had to figure it out as I went along,” Scholz says with a sigh.
That means he has to scour the internet, track down long-vanished cult directors, and make friends with officials at like-minded film festivals — all in the hope that someone will have a 35 mm print he can screen. Scholz also credits Ginny Sullivan at the Angelika with helping him negotiate the vagaries of the movie business in the new millennium.
Finally, he has to hope that there will be an audience for the movie. Mostly, there has been, even more remarkable given that the society has no marketing budget. Still, whenever 30 people show up, like they did for “Straw Dogs” in December, Scholz loses money.
This month’s feature is “Paranoia” (also known as “Orgasmo”), a 1969 sex and blood tale starring 1960s hottie Carroll Baker and directed by Italian Umberto Lenzi, who is famous for sex and blood. (And yes, says Scholz with a laugh, he does seem to have a preference for blood.) The film will be shown at 8 p.m. June 25, and it’s rated X. Tickets are $10 — cash only at the door.
Isn’t all of this a tiresome, tedious process? Perhaps. But Scholz is glad to have the chance to do it.
“When I told people I was going to do this, no one expected me to be able to,” he says. “They said it would cost too much money. But I don’t want to be like the Inwood. Those movies, people have seen enough of them. I want do something different.”
