Goodbye the seventies
Welcome to Screen Gems, our weekend of diving into adjacent queer and queer past titles worth watching or revisiting.
Retro: goodbye the seventies
We fell hard for this hedonistic ’70s and’ 90s underground queer cinema tribute / history lesson from writer / director Todd Verow earlier this year. Goodbye the seventies recalls both the making of utopian films for adults Boogie Nights and the old fashioned, let’s put on a show attitude of Summer stock. The story: At the end of the 1970s, a group of bathroom buds decided to make a gay adult film together, which became a surprise success. Their new references soon bring a lot of money, sex, drugs and chaos, even as the growing shadow of AIDS hangs more and more over their lives.
Verow channels the early films of the New Queer Cinema movement: gritty, low-budget production value, hardcore nudity, and a face-to-face attitude. It may seem amateurish at first glance, but in this case, That’s the point: Goodbye the seventies broadcasts both low budget gay adult movies of the 1970s and explicit gay cinema of the 1990s. This period saw films such as Fainting, poison, and RSVP push the boundaries of content, usually on a tight budget. Verow is challenging herself, in a way, to do what innovators like Cheryl Dunye, Kim Pierce, Todd Verow, Todd Haynes, and Marlon Riggs have done: find a way to make it work.
Self-explanatory, highly stylized, and – to our delight – moving in a weird way, we suggest giving it a watch both as an introduction to two significant decades of queer history and a personal statement from someone who has lived through it. both.
Streams on VUDU and YouTube.
