Some Personal News (and Fritz Lang in Los Feliz)

They are related, sort of...

I just got home to Los Angeles from some extended travels that were prompted by my trip to London to introduce films at the Old Man is Still Alive series that I put together with the British Film Institute. Tomorrow, a new series with some of the same films (and some different titles) begins here in Los Angeles. In 2022 and 2023, when the You Must Remember This Erotic 80s and Erotic 90s seasons were being released, I presented a series with the American Cinematheque called Erotic Tuesdays, wherein we showed films discussed on those podcast seasons…on Tuesdays, at the Los Feliz Three. Beginning tomorrow and running for eleven Tuesdays between this week and mid-July, we’re bringing back Erotic Tuesdays to showcase movies from the Old Man is Still Alive season that are engaged with Hollywood’s rules about what was permissible in terms of sex and sexual themes on screen, which evolved over the course of the 1950s and 60s.

The first film we’re showing is Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur, which is part one of his two-part “Indian Epic”; part two, The Indian Tomb, will be screening next week, on Tuesday, May 13. Many of Lang’s films throughout his career were engaged in kinkier psychosexual inquiry than what was typical while his films were being made. The “Indian” films —which, you have been warned, feature many white European actors in brownface to depict characters from India — are in some ways a throwback to the silent era, and also products of a late-1950s German film industry that was desperately trying to reconstitute itself both commercially and artistically post-World War II. Each film includes sequences depicting “sacred rituals” that are at once blatantly vehicles to film actress Debra Paget dancing while wearing almost nothing, and also inquiries into to what extent contemporary, Western, supposedly enlightened values about female sexuality are in any way different from the ancient practices of people who many American viewers in 1959 would exoticize (not that Lang doesn’t) or look down on as “primitive.”

I’m always excited to present films with the American Cinematheque, especially in Los Feliz, at the movie theater geographically closest to my house. But this series is special because I won’t be living nearby for much longer, and in fact these are the last public events I’m likely going to be doing in Los Angeles until late 2026 at the earliest. In September, I am moving to Rochester, New York to enroll in a one-year program at the Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum. This is a very intensive program, and it will involve a number of major life changes for me — even beyond re-enrolling in college at age 45. I won’t be able to travel away from New York very often, and I won’t have any free time to work on any other projects between September 2025 and the end of June 2026.

That includes You Must Remember This. I plan to spend the next three and a half months putting together some episodes that can be released in 2026. I don’t have any other details to share about that at this point — I’m still working out most of them myself. So keep your eyes on this space, and come and see me introduce some movies in Los Feliz this spring and summer if you can. You can buy tickets and find the full details about the American Cinematheque series here.