The set: A fair-sized screening room expensively but not ostentatiously furnished. Track lighting rather sloppily highlights the several paintings and graphics on the walls and some sculptures made of broken dishes, plastic and steel. Beyond the black drapes is a smaller room with a bar, and above the bar a neon clock in red and blue says “Market St. 1980” On the video screen is a film by Charles Braverman; the subject is Willie Nelson at Lake Tahoe.
Fewer than twenty people are here, including a couple of unreconstructed hippies and one compleat Punk, who hands around flyers for Dadafest LA. The sponsor of this event tonight is LA Cinematheque, and anyone who has a tape is invited to participate.
We see a pastiche that includes the Richard Pryor Show trailer, several bloopers by Channel 2 newscasters, a couple shots of female flashers on audience-participation shows, and the Jack LaLanne short on Physical Fitness for the dead (by Tee Bosustow.)
Next is a very amusing and original experimental film by Hugo Quintana called Cotton in the Ears, an allegory similar to the story of Pandora’s Box. It has no dialogue, only music and sound effects which were added later.
Some time during this film Tony Bill makes an appearance. When the lights go on he chats with a couple of people and then leaves with a young lady who arrived a few minutes before.
Then we see another tape brought by Tee Bosustow, made for the Real People Show, of Tuesday Night Mud Wrestling at Chippendale’s. Six women are the participants. They get all dolled up, disco out into the ring, then pair off and wrestle in the mud. Apparently this is a very popular event. One of the wrestlers is interviewed and states that she is a Santa Monica College student.
Next is a film about a filmmaker – by Chuck McMahan, about Steve Grumette – and within it is shown the entirely of Grumette’s film about painter Jesse Allen (Bright Tempest.) Grumette says there is about 15 minutes altogether of Jesse Allen speaking, and it’s composed of about 1000 cuts, and he took liberties such as rearranging word order and sentences. Why not? It’s done in book editing. One of Allen’s paintings is shown from inception to completion. He set up an Air Force surplus camera on one wall of his studio and a rig on the other wall to hold the canvas in the same position each time. Whenever he thought it appropriate the artist would make 10 seconds of film to add to the rest. The whole project of filming just this one painting took a year and a half. Grumette has a degree in physics and won an Academy Award for a film called The Magic Machines, about a sculptor.
The last thing shown is a short Super8 animated thing with designs made by lights, called Sky Light, by Gene Hamm.
RELATED:
Market Street in the old days of Venice, California and two other events at 73 Market
A former inhabitant of 73 Market Street, John Hamilton
Movies are Only a Life 
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