More than 2,000 guests are expected to descend on historic Franklin, Indiana, a three-hour drive from Chicago, Sept. 26-28, as the town hosts over 110 films, 20 educational seminars, six concerts, and “the world’s largest beach party,” all in the name of the “B-Movie.”
“We’re bringing the fun back into film,” said founder Bill Dever of the Indy Film Co-op.
The event, now in its second year, will also combine with the 10th anniversary of the TromaDance Film Festival, founded by legendary Troma Studios president Lloyd Kaufman (“The Toxic Avenger”).
B-Movie legend Jim Wynorski (“Chopping Mall”) is the curator for the event. Dever calls him “One of the great auteurs of B-movie filmmaking alive today.”
Films to be shown range from classics like “Night of the Living Dead,” “Psycho” and “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” to the premieres of many new films, including Wynorski’s own “Cloverfield” parody, “Cleaveagefield.”
“We all have base instincts and these films for better or worse appeal to those instincts,” says Dever. “A B-movie is a product aimed at mass appeal that has budget restrictions and has to rely on the guile, cunning and creativity of the directors and producers to be commercially viable.”
“People seeing the films here are saying, ?I remember when films were fun.’ But they recognize that sometimes, they were also great film art.”
A “B-Movie University” of seminars is designed to educate the next crop of populist low-budget filmmakers. Dever claims that the B-Movie genre is once again flourishing in the digital age, and that understanding the B-Movie aesthetic is perhaps more important than ever.
“With the onset of the internet as a distribution medium you’re going to have an explosion of this type of filmmaking,” he notes.
