Friday,
November 18 ~ Sunday, November
20
Written
By Terry Southern
 Terry
Southern (1924-1995) was the hipster's hipster, the perfect
icon of cool. A small-town Texan who disdained his "good
ol' boy" roots, he hung with the Beats, hobnobbed with
Sartre and Camus, and called William Faulkner a friend. The
crowd he ran with was composed of the most famous creative artists
of the day. Considered one of the most creative and original
players in the Paris Review circle, yet his greatest literary
success was the notorious semi- pornographic pulp novel Candy.
Southern wrote Dr. Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick,
Easy Rider with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and
was a face in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band (the guy in sunglasses). Wherever the
cultural action was, he was there, the life of every party -
Paris in the ‘50s, London in the swinging ‘60s, Greenwich Village,
and Hollywood. As a screenwriter, Terry Southern was an incomparable
satirist and, as the films in this series will attest, one of
the most genuine writing talents of this or any other age.
Friday,
November 18
at 7:00pm
Dr.
Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and
Love the Bomb
dir.
Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1964, 35mm, 94 mins, b/w
Introduced
by Nile Southern
 Stanley
Kubrick’s cool cynicism and Terry Southern’s caustic black humor
are perfectly wedded in this vision of nuclear apocalypse brought
about by a mad US general’s paranoia about women and Commies.
Nothing is sacred as Peter Sellers (in three roles), George
C. Scott and Slim Pickens, set out to stop the “Russkies” from
polluting America’s drinking water while trying to stave off
Doomsday. Forty years since its initial release, Strangelove
remains a perfect and timeless spoof of political and
military insanity.
Nile
Southern, Terry’s son and executor of the Terry Southern Estate
and iterary Trust, is the author of The
Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel
Candy (Arcade Publishing) and co-editor of Now Dig
This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995
(Grove Press). His novella, The Anarchivists of Eco-Dub,
is forthcoming.
Saturday,
November
19 at
7:00pm
The
Loved One
dir.
Tony Richardson, UK, 1965, 35mm, 118 mins, b/w
Introduced
by Gail Gerber
 Evelyn
Waugh's audacious satire on the Southern California way of life
(and death) was a long-time project of Luis Buńuel's, eventually
brought to the screen by British director Tony Richardson from
an adaptation by Southern and Christopher Isherwood. Billed
on its release as "the film with something to offend everyone,"
this classic black comedy concerns the sudden suicide of a Hollywood
celebrity and his nephew's subsequent problems in paying the
exorbitant funeral bill. The Loved One boasts a star-studded
cast, including Robert Morse as the Candide-like nephew,
Rod Steiger as the Oedipal Mr. Joyboy, and Liberace as a fastidious
casket salesman, as well as appearances by John Gielgud, James
Coburn, Milton Berle, Dana Andrews and a host of others.
Gail
Gerber, the widow of Terry Southern, met the young writer on
the set of The Loved One. She was trained as
a ballet dancer and was the youngest member of a French ballet
company based in Montreal. She did theater and film in
Hollywood and was in End of the Road by Aram Avakian. She is
currently working on her memoir about her experience of thirty-one
years with Terry Southern.
Sunday,
November
20 at
2:00pm
The
Cincinnati Kid
dir.
Norman Jewison, USA, 1965, 35mm, 102 mins, color
 Norman
Jewison's acclaimed character study of a young upstart poker
player stars Steve McQueen as "the Kid," who sets
out to prove he knows his way around the tables, and Edward
G. Robinson as the current poker king whose reign is in jeopardy.
Set in the New Orleans of the 1930s, Southern, along with co-writer
Ring Lardner, Jr., fill in the contentious world of gamblers
and gaming, where psychological one-upmanship and beating the
other fellow are the way of the world.
Sunday,
November
20 at
7:00pm
Easy
Rider
dir.
Dennis Hopper, USA, 1969, 35mm, 94 mins, color
 In
the picture that shook up Hollywood, Dennis Hopper and Peter
Fonda make one last dope deal to finance a cross-country bike
trip. A wildly successful generational manifesto, Easy Rider
reveled in countercultural values, promoting sex, drugs
and rock 'n roll with the fatalistic sense that long-haired
freaks would soon have to fight for their lives against killer
redneck straights. Shot on location by Laszlo Kovacs, Easy
Rider eschewed old-fashioned Hollywood polish for documentary
style immediacy and remains one of the seminal works of the
late '60s for its sharply perceptive portrait of those chaotic
times.
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