The Film Crew, aka Kevin Murphy, Mike Nelson, and Bill Corbett are gearing up to release riffed DVDs starting in April 2007. You can go to their site and vote for their first release, after watching the two minute clips riffing the opening of the four candidates.

Ordinarily, I’d just assume you read Satellite News and not mention this sort of thing, but I wanted to give myself a pat on the back and point out that two of the candidates have already appeared right here as part of Inventing Situations Playhouse. Namely, Killers From Space and The Giant of Marathon. And since I keep almost everything in endless rotation rotation, they will appear here again (and again, and again…)

What’s more, starting some time in the next week or two, those last two links will allow you to request a showing of those movies (well, selected still images from those movies) at a time you select thanks as part of our free beta test of the technology that will eventually let me charge you for the same thing. PROGRESS!

(Though the beta test will probably have some sort of limit on how many requests you can make, unless of course it turns out I’m being optimistic and I don’t get swamped with requests.)

To make use of the new movie catalog, I’m now displaying a brief “now playing” line during the IS Playhouse hours to help identify the movies and what not that you’re capping. I know this goes against the whole anti-clutter plan I have going with the upcoming layout changes, but everything should come together a little nicer next week.

Now that I’ve unleashed all this knowledge about the available movies, feel free to help me identify actors and artistes that I’ve got a good chunk of material from who might deserve “birthday parties” of their material at IS. It doesn’t have to be a huge chunk of material, a couple of feature films or so, and since it’s about the capping, these don’t have to be great artists. Here are some of the candidates I already have:

Cary Grant 1/18/1904
Lorne Greene 2/12/1915
Jack Webb 4/2/1920
Roger Corman 4/5/1926
Vincent Price 5/27/1911
Moe Howard 6/19/1897
Art Clokey 7/7/1921 (unconfirmed)
Joe Shuster 7/10/1914
Alfred Hitchcock 8/13/1899
Dick York 9/4/1928
Bert I. Gordon 9/24/1922
Jerry Siegel 10/17/1914
Bela Lugosi 10/20/1882
Boris Karloff 11/23/1887

There are a few problems here with dates bunching up.

I’ve just released a beta version of stage one of my latest crazy project: a catalog of the “Inventing Situations Playhouse” movies. Links to the films at the imdb and archive.org (where you can watch them!) It also includes the non-ephemeral Turkey day movies, even though most of them aren’t in the rotation yet.

Stage two of this project is going to let you pick a movie, and then through the magic of PayPal, send me money to let you cap it at the time and date of your choice. It might include some other good reasons to click into the movies and better searching and sorting.

Anyway, let me know what you think.