YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS presents Stanley Donen's MOVIE MOVIE (1978)

Name: YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS presents Stanley Donen's MOVIE MOVIE (1978)
Start: 2025-04-09T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-04-09T21:00:00-07:00
Location: Philosophical Research Society

Schedule

Wed Apr 09 2025 at 07:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Philosophical Research Society | Los Angeles, CA

To celebrate the new season of her acclaimed podcast, Karina Longworth presents Stanley Donen's meta Hollywood throwback double feature!
About this Event

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS Wednesdays with Karina Longworth!

The Philosophical Research Society is proud to welcome Karina Longworth – film critic, author, journalist and the creator and host of the beloved YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS podcast for two evenings – Henry Hathaway’s PETER IBBETSON on Wednesday, March 26th and Stanley Donen’s MOVIE, MOVIE on Wednesday, April 9th – in celebration of YMRT’s new season, which takes a close look at the latter day films of 14 directors from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Both screenings will be preceded by in-depth introductions by Longworth, illuminating the films’ fascinating histories and their places within their directors’ iconic oeuvres.

Since 2014, the podcast You Must Remember This has explored the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century, comparing and contrasting our perceptions and distorted memories of the past with the actual truth — or, at least, as close to the truth as we can get when discussing an industry that has always mythologized itself. That’s the “forgotten” history part; the “secret history” comes from reframing these stories using a contemporary female gaze, always with empathy for what it was like to be a human being—and often an outsider—at these various points in time.

YMRT’s current season, The Old Man is Still Alive, looks at the late filmographies of a number of directors whose careers began in the early decades of Hollywood, who were still making movies in the 60s and 70s (and even 80s). In many cases, these directors, many of them Oscar winners or the men behind undeniable classics like Metropolis, It's a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted (or were forced) to engage with massive changes in technology; sudden-seeming shifts in attitudes towards race and gender; and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be skeptical that an old man had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new “degenerate” cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, “the kids with beards” and tried to keep doing what they had been doing for 30 years; others were quick to try to get with the times by making films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society (even dropping acid as “research”); others fell somewhere in between.

MOVIE MOVIE (1978) – dir. Stanley Donen

Episode 13 of The Old Man is Still Alive (premiering April 8th) covers the late films of Stanley Donen, the choreographer who broke into directing by helping Gene Kelly bring On the Town to the screen in 1949, and later established himself as a master of both musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Damn Yankees) and Hitchcock-lite comedic thrillers (Charade, Arabesque).

Thirty years before Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez collaborated on the ersatz double feature Grindhouse, Donen invented this concept with Movie Movie, which combined two short pastiches of genres from the 1930s — the gritty, working-class-kids-manipulated-by-gangsters drama and the soundstage-bound backstage musical with kaleidoscopic/proto-pyschedelic dance numbers — into one feature, separated by a trailer for a fighter pilot movie that doesn’t exist. Donen put together a game ensemble of repertory players, some of whom, including George C. Scott, Red Buttons and Eli Wallach, appear in both short features. A young Harry Hamlin, hilarious and super-handsome, makes his screen debut as the sweet dumb-dumb of a boxer in the first half of the double feature, while Trish Van Devere (Scott’s wife) anchors the 42nd Street-spoofing antics of the musical second half. Drifting back and forth between Mel Brooks-esque parody and sincere (and borderline fetishistic) homage, Movie Movie is Hollywood postmodernism at its finest.

Program notes by Karina Longworth.

You Must Remember This creator, writer and host Karina Longworth will introduce this rare screening of this underseen 70s oddity!

Dir. Stanley Donen, 1978, 1h 45m, United States, Unrated, English, Color, Digital.

Ticket price: $15 (in-person event only).

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