posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
connielane at 05:42pm on 28/10/2014 under bnat
connielane at 05:42pm on 28/10/2014 under bnatNow that it's in Harry's inbox, here's my application. It was over 3000 words (including the text of the questions) -- that's longer than most of the papers I wrote in college!
1. List your full name, then a comma, then the worst name you’ve ever been called as an insult.
Pamela Nail, "Fat Bitch"
2. How many seats in your party? List the names of your hopeful co-attendees that you’re applying with. (NOTE: Each attendee must fill this application out too, no exceptions, if you list someone and they don’t get their app in, that’s a strike against you, so choose your partners carefully!)
Just me.
3. What is the date & location of your BIRTH & the best b-day present you ever got?
August 22, 1975. Knoxville, TN. For my 15th birthday I got a video cassette player, which meant I could watch movies in my own room whenever I wanted. AND it meant that I could watch movies that were awkward to watch with my parents in the privacy of my own space instead (hello, near-daily viewings of BULL DURHAM). It was a brand new day.
4. [REDACTED]
5. [REDACTED]
6. Your Twitter ID? (this is how we organize a BNAT Twitter Group)
@pknail
7. TOPAZ is a good 16th Anniversary type of thing... So, watch Alfred Hitchcock’s TOPAZ... then contemplate the perfect double feature for it, watch that... NOW – tell me what about TOPAZ made you choose that film and... what’d you think of TOPAZ?
For my double feature, I made it a Cuban Missile Crisis Combo of TOPAZ and Joe Dante's MATINEE! TOPAZ is the steak and baked potato with a shot of vodka, MATINEE is the five-dollar milkshake. After the relatively sober experience of TOPAZ, I needed something light and sweet, and the parody of American hysteria in MATINEE makes a great call-response to all the hush-hush and serious doings in TOPAZ. And while John Goodman's character is an obvious riff on William Castle, there are some clear nods to Hitchcock in him as well (the silhouette, the autograph seeker).
I enjoyed TOPAZ, even though (as with a lot of movies about foreign espionage) I worried about my ability to keep up with the plot, sometimes watching scenes over again to make sure I caught everything. It felt different from Hitchcock's better known movies, but you can definitely see his fingerprints on it, and not just in his cameo. The episodic nature of the plot reminded me of PSYCHO, where what (and who) the movie is "about" seems to change over the course of the film. The tension, especially the on-the-verge-of-being-caught sensation, reminded me of Grace Kelly getting caught snooping in Raymond Burr's apartment in REAR WINDOW. And of course the spy hijinks are reminiscent of ... well, several of Hitch's films, but perhaps especially (for me, anyway) NORTH BY NORTHWEST.
8. The number 16 is impossible to divorce from the thoughts of John Hughes. He’s gone now, but his work lives in many of us. What’s your favorite John Hughes movie and what life parallels does it hold for you? Explain.
THE BREAKFAST CLUB. Always has been. I have always loved the idea of people who seem fundamentally different coming together and finding common ground. When I was younger, I was fairly self-centered and saw myself as a Brian, the one who seemed like a dork but was actually pretty awesome once you got to know him. As I've grown older, I've realized that on the inside I'm much more of a Claire; one of my biggest faults is that I sometimes (perhaps frequently) think too highly of myself or think of myself as separate from other people and -- especially in high school -- did whatever I thought would make people like me. Of course, the whole point of the movie is that none of those characters are easily defined, just like no real person is easily defined. If I'd seen the movie's lesson (and seen myself) more clearly from the beginning, I wonder how much different my own high school experience would have been, because the best friendships of my life have always started with putting aside first impressions -- the "simplest terms" and "most convenient definitions."
Shout-out to THE GREAT OUTDOORS, too, which was very nearly my pick. I wore out my grandparents' VHS copy whenever we visited them. Dan Aykroyd cutting a rug to Land of 1000 Dances is the best of all things.
9. Since this is THE SWEET BUTT-NUMB-A-THON, what is your favorite sweet and what’s your worst SWEET story of excess?
Caramels (preferably Brach's) are my favorite sweet, but as for a sweet story of excess ... A place where I used to work had a picnic and I had to operate the cotton candy machine for an hour. I was actually pretty good at the twirling motion necessary to get the stuff on the paper cone, but since the machine wasn't one of the snazzy ones that amusement parks use, I got a lot of the stuff on my arms. A lot. By the end of the hour, I resembled a rainbow-colored werewolf.
10. We recently lost one of our sweetest BNATTERS, her name was Holly Blaine... in my wacky mind, I always thought of Holly as a distant relative of Rick Blaine, Humphrey Bogart’s brilliant character from CASABLANCA. God I love CASABLANCA, it has so many great character actors that I’ve followed off in a ton of directions. Who is your favorite character actor from CASABLANCA and what’s your fave film of theirs that isn’t CASABLANCA?
I'm trying to decide if it's cheating to say Claude Rains, and I'm going to say it's NOT -- he's TOTALLY a character actor, even though he had several leading roles. Favorite non-CASABLANCA role? I'm going to go with THE CLAIRVOYANT (1933), which I just recently discovered. Rains was in so many iconic movies where he was a very important second fiddle to a bigger star, but THE CLAIRVOYANT was one of *his* chances to be a star and with a director who knew how to highlight his gifts (and his marvelous face). It's such a cool film, with more substance than might be apparent at first glance. The whole idea of whether he has a duty to use his power and whether he's actually causing the disasters he predicts is fascinating. I love that his magic troupe consists of his wife (played by Fay Wray!) and his mom and dad, and that they're this little family act and their act is not especially great. I also got a kick out of the fact that the trick he and Rene use to guess objects is the same trick Tyrone Power would steal from Joan Blondell a couple of decades later in NIGHTMARE ALLEY.
11. Now tell me something about yourself – how did you come to love film?
It happened slowly and later than almost every film geek I know because I had limited access as a kid. My dad was a preacher in a small church, so that limited things, both for moral reasons and (even more so) for financial reasons. For most of my childhood -- late 70s / most of the 80s -- watching movies was limited to non-cable television (or treasured glimpses of HBO/Showtime/etc. at friends' houses). It was a Big Deal when I was taken to the movies to see ANNIE when I was 7, because we so rarely went to the movies, and I was one of the last among my friends to see it. I am STILL catching up on stuff that people my age saw when they were kids (don't even ask me how old I was when I first saw E.T.). I lived for the periodic network broadcasts of THE SOUND OF MUSIC, GONE WITH THE WIND, and THE WIZARD OF OZ. Those (and a few others) were pretty much the only classics I was exposed to as a kid, except when Disney would re-release one of theirs. When I was twelve we finally got cable, and shortly after that a VCR and a video membership, so I got to make up for *some* lost time. My junior year of high school, I saw what would become my favorite movie ever -- THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, which got me into more grown-up fare and made me start *thinking* about what I was watching.
When I got to college, I went to movie screenings at the student union almost every week, and I lived at Ray's Rent-A-Movie and Movie Gallery. I started getting interested in horror and other "genre" flicks, and horror became something I learned was actually scary in a fun way for me, not a damaging way like I'd always feared. In summer, I organized weekly midnight movie excursions with my co-workers, which got me obsessed with seeing new movies on opening weekend -- something I hadn't really thought about before. I was suddenly very aware of the unique experience of seeing a movie in a packed theater, or at least with a big group. I see a lot of movies by myself these days, and it's usually more conducive to concentrating on what's happening on screen. But there's nothing like seeing a movie -- even a bad movie -- as a shared experience (I will never, EVER forget the legendary group viewing of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE that happened in my apartment on Halloween 1994).
I dropped out of college for a couple of years and had what I think (and hope) is the lowest point in my life. My one constant was movies, and since this was still the era of the second-run $1.75 theater, I saw a bunch of stuff multiple times. There were several Friday nights where I did several movies in a row at different theaters all across town. Movies were basically all I did when I wasn't working or sleeping, and come to think of it, that's kind of how it still is, though I'm in a much better place in my life.
Just after I went back to college, looking for early reviews of TITANIC, I came across AICN, and what I loved and found encouraging about the site (and still do) was the sheer enthusiasm for movies of all stripes and how that was the utmost priority. This was a FUN thing, not something used to score cool cred points and exclude people who might be at a different point on the cinematic learning curve, and that was important to me as someone who was desperately trying to catch up. It was also around this time that I discovered our university library's impressive VHS collection, and I basically lived in the A.V. department my last two years, plugging away at the gaps in my classic and foreign movie knowledge. And then came BNAT, which kicked things up considerably. After that first year, I was looking at movies and genres I'd never even considered before, and it's had undoubtedly the biggest influence of my life on my movie watching habits and my willingness to watch pretty much anything.
Having said all that, though, "coming to love film" is something I think of as a process -- one that I still consider myself going through because I'm still learning.
12. Describe your favorite lonely day in a theater discovering a movie that you’ve been obsessed with ever since!
I saw Mike Leigh's TOPSY-TURVY in the winter of 2000 (or perhaps late December 1999) at the only old-school arthouse theater left in Nashville, the Belcourt. The screen was on a ornately framed stage up front (fitting for a movie about Gilbert & Sullivan), and you had to be a bit careful when you sat down in the seats because they sunk way down. This was the only theater where the movie was playing -- a frequent thing for most movies playing at the Belcourt. I'd seen a couple of Mike Leigh's films before, but while I liked them, I didn't feel a kinship with them and didn't feel a strong desire to see them again because they were so heavy. TOPSY-TURVY was a new experience entirely. It's like it came straight out of the part of my brain that loves musicals and classical music and historical details and dry British wit and ... *sigh*. I've seen it many times since on DVD, but the movie feels too large for a home setting (much like the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan themselves); and I've never seen it with anyone who gets why I love it so much. Just get me talking about this movie, I dare you. I love it and I love the Belcourt for giving it to me.
13. Outside of BUTT-NUMB-A-THON, what is the craziest thing your love of cinema has led you on? An Adventure? A Romantic moment? A near life-threatening act of stupidity? Dish...
It may not seem that crazy unless you're familiar with my history of travel disasters, but I took a trip out west several years ago to see the Alamo Rolling Roadshow screening of NORTH BY NORTHWEST at Mount Rushmore. I went by myself, and since it was super expensive to fly into Rapid City, I flew to Denver and drove the rest of the way. I didn't have a GPS yet, so it was a miracle that I only got lost once, and I managed to see not only Mount Rushmore and the movie, but also Devil's Tower, Badlands National Park, Crazy Horse, and Wall Drug, all within a couple of days. I was so proud of myself. Best vacation ever.
14. What classic film have you never seen, that you don’t want anyone to know about? Watch it. How was it?
DUCK SOUP. What a delight. Hail Freedonia! The puns! The musical numbers! The mirror scene! Harpo's chest-dog! Just Harpo in general! They won a war by THROWING FRUIT! And I think it's especially hilarious that Margaret Dumont's character insists that Rufus T. Firefly could run the government better than the people who were in charge at the beginning. Can we replace Congress with SNL alums? They've already got Al Franken! I only wish I could have seen this movie with some other people; that was the only negative for me.
15. BUTT-NUMB-A-THON is often about the hopes and dreams you have for the event... the films you hope for... but occasionally in the past... a nightmare has shown. Looking forward over the next 7 months of cinema ahead of us... What film would you absolutely fucking vomit if it played at this year’s BNAT?
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. On the other hand, it could be one of those cracktastic gems, so what do I know?
16. People apply to attend BNAT for all manners of reasons... what’s yours?
Because BNAT is the main reason why this is my favorite time of the year, and it's as much about BNAT-ers as it is about the event itself. Starting in October, when everyone starts anticipating the application. Then the application itself, which I think I would enjoy completing even if I wasn't submitting for a seat. The way the group comes together and roots for each other while we wait for the list. The way everyone who makes it onto the list feels simultaneously overjoyed for themselves and sad for friends and past BNAT-ers who didn't make it. How lots of people who don't make the list come for a shot at standby tickets and hang out anyway, and no one makes them feel out of place or unwelcome. They way we all bond over those 24 hours, rejoicing over the awesome stuff and sometimes commiserating over other stuff as if we've lived through a Vietnam-esque experience together. The conversations about the movies between features and at the post-BNAT events. The tragedy of seeing a new film I love but that I have to wait to see again because it won't come out for weeks/months. BNAT is like a family reunion, only there's a lot more people that I like, and when it's over, the rest of the year is a little depressing.
17. A profound influence on my life, Producer JAMES JACKS passed away this year. He took me under his wing and taught me more about the film industry than any other human being. Look him up, what’s your favorite JACKS produced movie and why?
DAZED AND CONFUSED. It was pretty formative for my college years and early twenties and is highly quotable ("Dominant male monkey motherfucker."). It's chock full of actors (most of them secondary or even background players) who went on to do huge things in movies and television. And it has an amazing soundtrack (don't come near me when I'm jamming to "Cherrybomb" - there may be injuries).
18. This year, I got cast in an AT&T GIGAPOWER Commercial with Dale Watson, but they took some still photos, which they used in BANNER ADS online. In this photo, I’m making an O-FACE. I don’t want to see your WAR FACE, show me your O-FACE!!! (This picture will likely be your YEARBOOK & BADGE photo – So Make it the best O-FACE of your life!!!
19. 16 years of BUTT-NUMB-A-THON... Look over all the films that have played (found here on Wikipedia) and recreate your favorite memory out of that movie that most leaps out at you from that list. (This picture will likely be the most fun!)
20. If you could enhance the ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE’s Menu for BUTT-NUMB-A-THON 16 – what would you have on it?
Bring back one or two of the old menu items, like the pasta bowl. Or wasn't there some form of steak on there at one point?
21. (BONUS OPTIONAL VIDEO CHALLENGE) – The Alamo Drafthouse has some of the best “NO TALKING, TEXTING, TWEETING” PSAs in the world. Shoot your own. What behavior annoys you in a theater and what would the punishment be if you wouldn’t go to jail for doing it. This video should be uploaded to YOUTUBE. A Link should appear as the answer to this BONUS QUESTION. You can apply without this question... but c’mon... go for it! You can parody films, it can be stop-motion, it can be whatever you make of it – but it must be no longer than a minute, but can be as short as you wish.
1. List your full name, then a comma, then the worst name you’ve ever been called as an insult.
Pamela Nail, "Fat Bitch"
2. How many seats in your party? List the names of your hopeful co-attendees that you’re applying with. (NOTE: Each attendee must fill this application out too, no exceptions, if you list someone and they don’t get their app in, that’s a strike against you, so choose your partners carefully!)
Just me.
3. What is the date & location of your BIRTH & the best b-day present you ever got?
August 22, 1975. Knoxville, TN. For my 15th birthday I got a video cassette player, which meant I could watch movies in my own room whenever I wanted. AND it meant that I could watch movies that were awkward to watch with my parents in the privacy of my own space instead (hello, near-daily viewings of BULL DURHAM). It was a brand new day.
4. [REDACTED]
5. [REDACTED]
6. Your Twitter ID? (this is how we organize a BNAT Twitter Group)
@pknail
7. TOPAZ is a good 16th Anniversary type of thing... So, watch Alfred Hitchcock’s TOPAZ... then contemplate the perfect double feature for it, watch that... NOW – tell me what about TOPAZ made you choose that film and... what’d you think of TOPAZ?
For my double feature, I made it a Cuban Missile Crisis Combo of TOPAZ and Joe Dante's MATINEE! TOPAZ is the steak and baked potato with a shot of vodka, MATINEE is the five-dollar milkshake. After the relatively sober experience of TOPAZ, I needed something light and sweet, and the parody of American hysteria in MATINEE makes a great call-response to all the hush-hush and serious doings in TOPAZ. And while John Goodman's character is an obvious riff on William Castle, there are some clear nods to Hitchcock in him as well (the silhouette, the autograph seeker).
I enjoyed TOPAZ, even though (as with a lot of movies about foreign espionage) I worried about my ability to keep up with the plot, sometimes watching scenes over again to make sure I caught everything. It felt different from Hitchcock's better known movies, but you can definitely see his fingerprints on it, and not just in his cameo. The episodic nature of the plot reminded me of PSYCHO, where what (and who) the movie is "about" seems to change over the course of the film. The tension, especially the on-the-verge-of-being-caught sensation, reminded me of Grace Kelly getting caught snooping in Raymond Burr's apartment in REAR WINDOW. And of course the spy hijinks are reminiscent of ... well, several of Hitch's films, but perhaps especially (for me, anyway) NORTH BY NORTHWEST.
8. The number 16 is impossible to divorce from the thoughts of John Hughes. He’s gone now, but his work lives in many of us. What’s your favorite John Hughes movie and what life parallels does it hold for you? Explain.
THE BREAKFAST CLUB. Always has been. I have always loved the idea of people who seem fundamentally different coming together and finding common ground. When I was younger, I was fairly self-centered and saw myself as a Brian, the one who seemed like a dork but was actually pretty awesome once you got to know him. As I've grown older, I've realized that on the inside I'm much more of a Claire; one of my biggest faults is that I sometimes (perhaps frequently) think too highly of myself or think of myself as separate from other people and -- especially in high school -- did whatever I thought would make people like me. Of course, the whole point of the movie is that none of those characters are easily defined, just like no real person is easily defined. If I'd seen the movie's lesson (and seen myself) more clearly from the beginning, I wonder how much different my own high school experience would have been, because the best friendships of my life have always started with putting aside first impressions -- the "simplest terms" and "most convenient definitions."
Shout-out to THE GREAT OUTDOORS, too, which was very nearly my pick. I wore out my grandparents' VHS copy whenever we visited them. Dan Aykroyd cutting a rug to Land of 1000 Dances is the best of all things.
9. Since this is THE SWEET BUTT-NUMB-A-THON, what is your favorite sweet and what’s your worst SWEET story of excess?
Caramels (preferably Brach's) are my favorite sweet, but as for a sweet story of excess ... A place where I used to work had a picnic and I had to operate the cotton candy machine for an hour. I was actually pretty good at the twirling motion necessary to get the stuff on the paper cone, but since the machine wasn't one of the snazzy ones that amusement parks use, I got a lot of the stuff on my arms. A lot. By the end of the hour, I resembled a rainbow-colored werewolf.
10. We recently lost one of our sweetest BNATTERS, her name was Holly Blaine... in my wacky mind, I always thought of Holly as a distant relative of Rick Blaine, Humphrey Bogart’s brilliant character from CASABLANCA. God I love CASABLANCA, it has so many great character actors that I’ve followed off in a ton of directions. Who is your favorite character actor from CASABLANCA and what’s your fave film of theirs that isn’t CASABLANCA?
I'm trying to decide if it's cheating to say Claude Rains, and I'm going to say it's NOT -- he's TOTALLY a character actor, even though he had several leading roles. Favorite non-CASABLANCA role? I'm going to go with THE CLAIRVOYANT (1933), which I just recently discovered. Rains was in so many iconic movies where he was a very important second fiddle to a bigger star, but THE CLAIRVOYANT was one of *his* chances to be a star and with a director who knew how to highlight his gifts (and his marvelous face). It's such a cool film, with more substance than might be apparent at first glance. The whole idea of whether he has a duty to use his power and whether he's actually causing the disasters he predicts is fascinating. I love that his magic troupe consists of his wife (played by Fay Wray!) and his mom and dad, and that they're this little family act and their act is not especially great. I also got a kick out of the fact that the trick he and Rene use to guess objects is the same trick Tyrone Power would steal from Joan Blondell a couple of decades later in NIGHTMARE ALLEY.
11. Now tell me something about yourself – how did you come to love film?
It happened slowly and later than almost every film geek I know because I had limited access as a kid. My dad was a preacher in a small church, so that limited things, both for moral reasons and (even more so) for financial reasons. For most of my childhood -- late 70s / most of the 80s -- watching movies was limited to non-cable television (or treasured glimpses of HBO/Showtime/etc. at friends' houses). It was a Big Deal when I was taken to the movies to see ANNIE when I was 7, because we so rarely went to the movies, and I was one of the last among my friends to see it. I am STILL catching up on stuff that people my age saw when they were kids (don't even ask me how old I was when I first saw E.T.). I lived for the periodic network broadcasts of THE SOUND OF MUSIC, GONE WITH THE WIND, and THE WIZARD OF OZ. Those (and a few others) were pretty much the only classics I was exposed to as a kid, except when Disney would re-release one of theirs. When I was twelve we finally got cable, and shortly after that a VCR and a video membership, so I got to make up for *some* lost time. My junior year of high school, I saw what would become my favorite movie ever -- THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, which got me into more grown-up fare and made me start *thinking* about what I was watching.
When I got to college, I went to movie screenings at the student union almost every week, and I lived at Ray's Rent-A-Movie and Movie Gallery. I started getting interested in horror and other "genre" flicks, and horror became something I learned was actually scary in a fun way for me, not a damaging way like I'd always feared. In summer, I organized weekly midnight movie excursions with my co-workers, which got me obsessed with seeing new movies on opening weekend -- something I hadn't really thought about before. I was suddenly very aware of the unique experience of seeing a movie in a packed theater, or at least with a big group. I see a lot of movies by myself these days, and it's usually more conducive to concentrating on what's happening on screen. But there's nothing like seeing a movie -- even a bad movie -- as a shared experience (I will never, EVER forget the legendary group viewing of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE that happened in my apartment on Halloween 1994).
I dropped out of college for a couple of years and had what I think (and hope) is the lowest point in my life. My one constant was movies, and since this was still the era of the second-run $1.75 theater, I saw a bunch of stuff multiple times. There were several Friday nights where I did several movies in a row at different theaters all across town. Movies were basically all I did when I wasn't working or sleeping, and come to think of it, that's kind of how it still is, though I'm in a much better place in my life.
Just after I went back to college, looking for early reviews of TITANIC, I came across AICN, and what I loved and found encouraging about the site (and still do) was the sheer enthusiasm for movies of all stripes and how that was the utmost priority. This was a FUN thing, not something used to score cool cred points and exclude people who might be at a different point on the cinematic learning curve, and that was important to me as someone who was desperately trying to catch up. It was also around this time that I discovered our university library's impressive VHS collection, and I basically lived in the A.V. department my last two years, plugging away at the gaps in my classic and foreign movie knowledge. And then came BNAT, which kicked things up considerably. After that first year, I was looking at movies and genres I'd never even considered before, and it's had undoubtedly the biggest influence of my life on my movie watching habits and my willingness to watch pretty much anything.
Having said all that, though, "coming to love film" is something I think of as a process -- one that I still consider myself going through because I'm still learning.
12. Describe your favorite lonely day in a theater discovering a movie that you’ve been obsessed with ever since!
I saw Mike Leigh's TOPSY-TURVY in the winter of 2000 (or perhaps late December 1999) at the only old-school arthouse theater left in Nashville, the Belcourt. The screen was on a ornately framed stage up front (fitting for a movie about Gilbert & Sullivan), and you had to be a bit careful when you sat down in the seats because they sunk way down. This was the only theater where the movie was playing -- a frequent thing for most movies playing at the Belcourt. I'd seen a couple of Mike Leigh's films before, but while I liked them, I didn't feel a kinship with them and didn't feel a strong desire to see them again because they were so heavy. TOPSY-TURVY was a new experience entirely. It's like it came straight out of the part of my brain that loves musicals and classical music and historical details and dry British wit and ... *sigh*. I've seen it many times since on DVD, but the movie feels too large for a home setting (much like the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan themselves); and I've never seen it with anyone who gets why I love it so much. Just get me talking about this movie, I dare you. I love it and I love the Belcourt for giving it to me.
13. Outside of BUTT-NUMB-A-THON, what is the craziest thing your love of cinema has led you on? An Adventure? A Romantic moment? A near life-threatening act of stupidity? Dish...
It may not seem that crazy unless you're familiar with my history of travel disasters, but I took a trip out west several years ago to see the Alamo Rolling Roadshow screening of NORTH BY NORTHWEST at Mount Rushmore. I went by myself, and since it was super expensive to fly into Rapid City, I flew to Denver and drove the rest of the way. I didn't have a GPS yet, so it was a miracle that I only got lost once, and I managed to see not only Mount Rushmore and the movie, but also Devil's Tower, Badlands National Park, Crazy Horse, and Wall Drug, all within a couple of days. I was so proud of myself. Best vacation ever.
14. What classic film have you never seen, that you don’t want anyone to know about? Watch it. How was it?
DUCK SOUP. What a delight. Hail Freedonia! The puns! The musical numbers! The mirror scene! Harpo's chest-dog! Just Harpo in general! They won a war by THROWING FRUIT! And I think it's especially hilarious that Margaret Dumont's character insists that Rufus T. Firefly could run the government better than the people who were in charge at the beginning. Can we replace Congress with SNL alums? They've already got Al Franken! I only wish I could have seen this movie with some other people; that was the only negative for me.
15. BUTT-NUMB-A-THON is often about the hopes and dreams you have for the event... the films you hope for... but occasionally in the past... a nightmare has shown. Looking forward over the next 7 months of cinema ahead of us... What film would you absolutely fucking vomit if it played at this year’s BNAT?
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. On the other hand, it could be one of those cracktastic gems, so what do I know?
16. People apply to attend BNAT for all manners of reasons... what’s yours?
Because BNAT is the main reason why this is my favorite time of the year, and it's as much about BNAT-ers as it is about the event itself. Starting in October, when everyone starts anticipating the application. Then the application itself, which I think I would enjoy completing even if I wasn't submitting for a seat. The way the group comes together and roots for each other while we wait for the list. The way everyone who makes it onto the list feels simultaneously overjoyed for themselves and sad for friends and past BNAT-ers who didn't make it. How lots of people who don't make the list come for a shot at standby tickets and hang out anyway, and no one makes them feel out of place or unwelcome. They way we all bond over those 24 hours, rejoicing over the awesome stuff and sometimes commiserating over other stuff as if we've lived through a Vietnam-esque experience together. The conversations about the movies between features and at the post-BNAT events. The tragedy of seeing a new film I love but that I have to wait to see again because it won't come out for weeks/months. BNAT is like a family reunion, only there's a lot more people that I like, and when it's over, the rest of the year is a little depressing.
17. A profound influence on my life, Producer JAMES JACKS passed away this year. He took me under his wing and taught me more about the film industry than any other human being. Look him up, what’s your favorite JACKS produced movie and why?
DAZED AND CONFUSED. It was pretty formative for my college years and early twenties and is highly quotable ("Dominant male monkey motherfucker."). It's chock full of actors (most of them secondary or even background players) who went on to do huge things in movies and television. And it has an amazing soundtrack (don't come near me when I'm jamming to "Cherrybomb" - there may be injuries).
18. This year, I got cast in an AT&T GIGAPOWER Commercial with Dale Watson, but they took some still photos, which they used in BANNER ADS online. In this photo, I’m making an O-FACE. I don’t want to see your WAR FACE, show me your O-FACE!!! (This picture will likely be your YEARBOOK & BADGE photo – So Make it the best O-FACE of your life!!!
19. 16 years of BUTT-NUMB-A-THON... Look over all the films that have played (found here on Wikipedia) and recreate your favorite memory out of that movie that most leaps out at you from that list. (This picture will likely be the most fun!)
20. If you could enhance the ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE’s Menu for BUTT-NUMB-A-THON 16 – what would you have on it?
Bring back one or two of the old menu items, like the pasta bowl. Or wasn't there some form of steak on there at one point?
21. (BONUS OPTIONAL VIDEO CHALLENGE) – The Alamo Drafthouse has some of the best “NO TALKING, TEXTING, TWEETING” PSAs in the world. Shoot your own. What behavior annoys you in a theater and what would the punishment be if you wouldn’t go to jail for doing it. This video should be uploaded to YOUTUBE. A Link should appear as the answer to this BONUS QUESTION. You can apply without this question... but c’mon... go for it! You can parody films, it can be stop-motion, it can be whatever you make of it – but it must be no longer than a minute, but can be as short as you wish.
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