Hi, are you feeling patriotic yet? Usually I’m not either, but that whole Obama singing “Amazing Grace” thing still hasn’t quite worn off. I’d call you a liar if you said you didn’t cry at least a little bit. Like, that was some realness. Or maybe just a speech writer’s brilliant means of getting us to forget about… what are those thingamabobs called again? Those silent death dealing demons of the sky? Oh right, drones. Well, at least I had a brief moment of nationalist, er, I mean patriotic pride this Birthday Season.
film screenings
And the First Two Films of Nitehawk’s Summer Series Will Be…
Nitehawk Cinema just announced that its summer outdoor screening series, in collaboration with BuzzFeed, will kick off with Billy Madison and Mallrats. That’s right: come July, you’ll be able to sit under those silvery stars and reminisce about those younger years when you were hot for teacher like manchild Billy Madison, or when you sought refuge in the mall after being dumped, like Brodie Bruce and TS Quint.
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Wednesday: See Billy Leroy On the Big Screen and in Person
We were devastated — really just devastated — when Billy Leroy, star of Travel Channel’s Baggage Battles, told us he had ditched plans to return to the old spot on Houston Street where he sold subway signs, skulls, and sundries out of a tent. It’s not like we ever had room to keep a stuffed coyote in our apartment, and our taste in art doesn’t really tend toward blue demons — but everyone knows Billy’s Antiques & Props was one of the last holdovers from the days before “metro-suburbanites,” as Billy likes to call them, swarmed the Bowery in flip-flops. Which is why Jim Jarmusch showed up at the closing party.
Wednesday, that green tent will live again — on the big screen — as we present Dirty Old Town at the B+B Newsroom. (The event is free: just let us know you’re coming.) This fine work of cinema verité portrays Billy as an antiques dealer — and a “leader of fools and king of gypsies” — who has 72 hours to make the rent, or his landlord will turn his junk store into a Starbucks. All the while Billy has to resist the advances of a young party vixen played by Janell Shirtcliff (it’s hard out there for a props dealer) who also has her claws in a preppy restaurateur played by Paul Sevigny of Beatrice Inn. (Sevigny’s band A.R.E Weapons contributed an ode to gentrification, “Parking Lot,” to the soundtrack.) Maybe the best part: Scott Dillin, an ex-cop who actually patrolled the mean streets of the LES back in the bad old days, plays a hard-drinking, wrong-thinking boy in blue.
Are you starting to see why Abel Ferrara presented Dirty Old Town when it premiered in Manhattan? Take it from the man himself: “This film is fucking real.”
So join us Wednesday at 155 Grand Street, off of Bedford Ave., in Williamsburg as we screen this insta-classic and then talk to the film’s star, Billy Leroy, as well as the filmmakers, Jenner Furst, Daniel B. Levin and Julia Willoughby Nason. Furst and Levin will also be taking questions about Captured, their documentary about LES photographer Clayton Patterson (who also has a part in Dirty Old Town). Stop in and have a Stumptown stubbie on us.
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