Underground and Emigrants

Studio 54 was the epicenter of 70s hedonism - a place that not only redefined the nightclub, but also came to symbolize an entire era. Its co-owners, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, two friends from Brooklyn, seemed to come out of nowhere to suddenly preside over a new kind of New York society. Now, 39 years after the velvet rope was first slung across the club's hallowed threshold, a feature documentary tells the real story behind the greatest club of all time.

An investigation of how Hollywood's fabled stories have deeply influenced how Americans feel about transgender people, and how transgender people have been taught to feel about themselves.

Traces the Beats from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's meeting in 1944 at Columbia University to the deaths of Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997. Three actors provide dramatic interpretations of the work of these three writers, and the film chronicles their friendships, their arrival into American consciousness, their travels, frequent parodies, Kerouac's death, and Ginsberg's politicization. Their movement connects with bebop, John Cage's music, abstract expressionism, and living theater. In recent interviews, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Mailer, Jerry Garcia, Tom Hayden, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, and others measure the Beats' meaning and impact.

Throughout the 1950s, Tab Hunter reigned as Hollywood’s ultimate male heartthrob. But throughout his years of stardom, Tab had a secret. Tab Hunter was gay, and spent his Hollywood years in a precarious closet that repeatedly threatened to implode and destroy him. Tab Hunter himself shares first hand, for the first time, what it was like to be a studio manufactured movie star during the Golden Age of Hollywood and the consequences of being someone totally different from his studio manufactured image.

East Village, New York, 1978. William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, and other brilliant minds come together in an explosion of ideas, art, and rebellion.

For No Good Reason a film about Ralph Steadman. Johnny Depp guides the visually stunning journey, smashing narrative conventions, moving seamlessly from interview to animation and in the finest Gonzo tradition questions of witness and authenticity are challenged. Steadman's art is for the first time animated, including illustrations from Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vagas. Featuring Richard E Grant, Terry Gilliam, Bruce Robinson and with music from Slash, The All American Rejects, Jason Mraz, Crystal Castles, Ed Hardcourt and Beth Orton. A touching and at times funny film about honesty, friendship and the ambition driving an artist. This is a true record of the demise of the 20th Century counterculture and hipster dream with Ralph Steadman the last of the Gonzo visionaries.

What was your first desire? What did you long for most? Arielle Dombasle put these questions to a wide circle of famous people.

Lire is a cinematographic series of filmed portraits that shows, in a single large fixed and sound sequence shot of 3 minutes 20 seconds, a writer reading the beginning of his last published book.

In 1977, Bette Midler's first television special premiered, featuring guest stars Dustin Hoffman and Emmett Kelly. It went on to win Bette her first Emmy Award for Outstanding Special — Comedy-Variety or Music. To make the show palatable to home viewers, the special featured heavily cleaned up versions of the material Midler was performing at that time on stage. The title of the show, Ol' Red Hair is Back, was a takeoff on the title of Frank Sinatra's recent album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back.

A founding member of The Blind Boys of Alabama, one of the world’s most successful gospel groups, Clarence Fountain has lived a remarkable life, full of music and passion. Now in his eighties, slowed by age and diabetes, Clarence retains his brash charm, and wistfully recalls his decades of glory, from beginnings in the choir of a school for the blind, to the group’s sudden rise to stardom as “Oedipus” in the experimental musical The Gospel at Colonus.

Will Hunting is a headstrong, working-class genius who is failing the lessons of life. After one too many run-ins with the law, Will's last chance is a psychology professor, who might be the only man who can reach him.

Notorious Baltimore criminal and underground figure Divine goes up against Connie & Raymond Marble, a sleazy married couple who make a passionate attempt to humiliate her and seize her tabloid-given title as "The Filthiest Person Alive".

Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.

In 1950s Mexico City, William Lee, an American ex-pat in his late forties, leads a solitary life amidst a small American community. However, the arrival in town of Eugene Allerton, a young student, stirs William into finally establishing a meaningful connection with someone.

A trio of female soul singers cross over to the pop charts in the early 1960s, facing their own personal struggles along the way.

'Pleasantly plump' teenager Tracy Turnblad achieves her dream of becoming a regular on the Corny Collins Dance Show. Now a teen hero, she starts using her fame to speak out for the causes she believes in, most of all integration. In doing so, she earns the wrath of the show's former star, Amber Von Tussle, as well as Amber's manipulative, pro-segregation parents. The rivalry comes to a head as Amber and Tracy vie for the title of Miss Auto Show 1963.

Portland, Oregon, 1971. Bob Hughes is the charismatic leader of a peculiar quartet, formed by his wife, Dianne, and another couple, Rick and Nadine, who skillfully steal from drugstores and hospital medicine cabinets in order to appease their insatiable need for drugs. But neither fun nor luck last forever.

Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine Fishpaw turns to the bottle as her life falls apart -- until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow. Originally screened with "Odorama" scratch and sniff cards so the audience could (at their own risk) smell along with the film.

The Cavalcade of Perversion, a traveling freak show, acts as a front for Divine, who is out for blood after discovering her lover's affair.

Fando and his partially paralysed lover Lis search for the mythical city of Tar.

A girl born with enormous thumbs in the repressive era of the 1950s learns to turn her quirks into assets.

Teenage delinquent Dawn Davenport, incensed after her parents do not give her the cha-cha heels she wanted for Christmas, runs away from home. After an illegitimate child and hairstylist husband bring her more misery, she's enticed into a life of crime when the owners of her husband's salon promise her fame and fortune.

On New Year's Eve 1928, in the New York underworld, a gambler sells his body to science, a gangster needs a transfusion, and a gambler is on the run

A deranged killer wearing a clown mask begins preying on a group of young women working at a phone-sex company.

An oddball family on a Kansas farm are trapped in their farmhouse by an impending storm. The patriarch of the clan is a retired soda pop tycoon. He is currently dating a children's TV evangelist. Also living at the farm is his layabout daughter and her precocious 8 year old daughter, his would-be artist son, the son's fiancée, and the black maid. Also thrown into the mix is the daughter's ex-husband, a ne-er-do-well who is seeking to get back in his ex-wife's good graces.

A model tells a television crew about her dreams of a life with prince charming all while fending off the lecherous advances of a horde of men.

Stylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.

After the apocalypse, a group of survivors take shelter in a junkyard beside a nuclear crater. Led by a messianic punk rocker named Emanou, they hide out from corrupt authorities while indulging their wildest fantasies.

Robert McCall is forced to work with a former terrorist turned monk by the name of Joseph Heiden(Telly Savalas), whom he despises and mistrusts, on a deadly mission in New York.

Toby and his sister Liz live with their aunt and uncle, who take in Cambodian orphan Hoang while he awaits foster placement. The trio become fast friends, and, as they explore a nearby wood, encounter a retired engineer living in an abandoned freight car. Playing off Toby's already active imagination, the kids and the engineer use the train car to make a fantastic journey to Cambodia.

About the members of a New York City gym obsessed about their life situations, eventually leading up to the gay and straight characters writhing together in an orgy. An updated version of the original off-Broadway play.

An African-American musical version of Sophocles's tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus. In 1985 PBS televised the original Brooklyn Academy of Music production, as presented by the American Music Theater Festival at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, as part of the Great Performances series.

Multiple overlapping images combine with still-frames of an amorous Puerto Rican filmmaker's telephone conversation with a repairman, coincidentally also interested in film. Written by Lee Breuer and performed by Ruth Maleczeck, both of Mabou Mines theatre company. Music by Bob Telson.

This raunchy spoof of women's prison films with a star studded cast was filmed in front of a live audience at Hollywood’s iconic Montalban Theater.

Moi-même is an experimental narrative film shot from 1968–1969 by Lee Breuer and future members of the theater company Mabou Mines. The film captures the journey of a 12-year-old boy attempting to create a film collective amid the backdrop of the May, 1968 protests in Paris. After decades of abandonment, the filmmaker’s son has revitalized the original footage through editing, the addition of a new script, and a complete soundtrack, honoring the original collaborators' spirit while adding fresh perspectives and acknowledging the passage of time.

Produced in 1978, The Neon Woman is an “outrageous murder mystery” set in a run-down Baltimore burlesque house managed by a retired stripper, Flash Storm, the hottest stripper that ever lived who has gone legit, opened her own strip joint, and is trying to cope with whatever comes along. There's Kitty Larue, the stripper with an identity problem. There's the horny bible thumping senator who wants to pray with Divine but really wants something less spiritual. Finally, Divine's young virgin daughter returns from boarding school and within minutes is turned into an alcoholic, heroin addicted stripper who has been betrothed to the black janitor. There's more but as the cliché goes, it has to be seen to be believed! By the time of it's VHS release, the 12 year old live footage was already a bit raw and gritty, but still gives more than a fair idea as to why Divine was so loved as a performer. The production ran for eighty-four performances at the Hurrah Discotheque, New York.