Quick Snaps: Double-Theater Double Feature

I realize you all are looking at the above photo and thinking, "Those double-features on the Paramount marquee are in no way unusual. Jette, did someone spike your oatmeal?" Hang on, and I'll tell you the whole story, with another photo to give you a hint after the jump.

It was August 2006. I loved the movie Ball of Fire and wanted to see it at the Paramount. I didn't feel a need to see His Girl Friday again, though. I was in a double-feature mood, but not for that double feature. I knew what I wanted to see instead. So I skipped the August 1 screening -- which it turned out Quentin Tarantino attended, as many people reported later -- and set my sights for the evening of Wednesday, August 2.

I built my own double feature that night. Sure, we do it all the time with DVDs, but how often do you get to pick two movies that go great together in two different theaters? You can do it in downtown Austin sometimes, if you're very lucky.

I saw Ball of Fire at the Paramount, which I enjoyed  very much as usual, and then walked a few blocks south for Weird Wednesday at Alamo Drafthouse (the one on Colorado). Weird Wednesday had provided me with what I thought would be an excellent second film. What I really wanted was a Pam Grier flick -- for some reason I've always thought she and Stanwyck had an oddly similar onscreen presence -- but I got the next best thing.

Unfortunately, the Alamo marquee from that night doesn't specify the movie playing, but I can remember it quite clearly: T.N.T. Jackson, starring Jeannie Bell. In this 1974 Filipino exploitation film (thanks to Lars Nilsen, I now know more about Filipino exploitation films that I would ever have imagined ... five years ago I wasn't aware such a sub genre existed), Bell plays a young woman expert in karate, who is searching for the men who killed her brother. As Quentin Tarantino once noted during a QT Fest, the movie has a wondefully quotable tagline: "T.N.T. Jackson ... she'll throw you in traction!"

The movie was full of cheesy dialogue and bad kung-fu and goofy action scenes, which is just what I like in a midnight movie. Somehow it worked beautifully in tandem with the 1941 Howard Hawks comedy, I'm not entirely sure why. Two strong, fearless women who are very determined to get what they want -- that's just about the only connection between the films. Of course, the fact that I was at a Weird Wednesday film, which I hardly ever got to attend (I manage about one a year), only added to the fun.

I'd nearly forgotten about that night until I noticed that a) Ball of Fire is playing in Austin tonight and b) Weird Wednesday programmer Lars Nilsen was recommending it. I wonder what he'd pair up with the film? I did write about the double feature very briefly at the time ... and now I marvel that we used to write such short entries here at Slackerwood. We've come a long way since 2006.

Tonight, you can see Ball of Fire for free over at the Texas Union Theater at 7:30 pm. It's an Austin Cinematheque screening, which means a good 35mm print of the film. Unfortunately, there's not much nearby you can pair the movie with afterwards for a double-theatre double-feature. Over at Dobie, you could see Kick-Ass, but somehow fearless little Hit-Girl doesn't have enough personality to match Barbara Stanwyck. You could zip over to Alamo Ritz for Phantom of the Paradise ... no. You're probably better off heading over to Vulcan, where hopefully they have T.N.T. Jackson or Coffy or something else along those lines.

Do you suppose if I asked the Paramount to start teaming up their classic romantic comedies with classic exploitation films, that they'd create these double-features themselves? Probably not. It's more fun to put together your own double-theater double-feature. If you've done this yourself, let me know in the comments.