Posted by Runshouse21 at nytgate1.nytimes.com on March 10, 2004 at 16:26:05:
Amateur Celebrities Pick a Movie and Join In
By RANDY KENNEDY
All the evidence in the room pointed to imminent karaoke. There was a tiny stage and a television monitor flashing words. There was an energetic hostess trying to whip people into the mood. And the people, about a dozen, were waiting patiently for their third beer to lend them the necessary talent.
But when the first amateur celebrity took the stage, it was not to belt out his own heartfelt version of "Candle in the Wind." Instead he crouched like a lemur and began to croak out a scene from "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," as a movie screen behind him showed the monologue by the creature Gollum.
"We hates them!" whispered the man on the stage, Oden Roberts, a 27-year-old cinematographer, crawling around as his friends whooped and clapped. When his performance was over, Mr. Roberts reported that, really, it was not all that different from karaoke.
"You just have to put your body into it more," he said. Or if you are really dedicated, your hair: Mr. Roberts had moussed his up into little blond spikes, perhaps better to resemble a Middle Earth creature. "It took me half an hour to get it like this," he said.
He had just become a willing test subject in the service of movieoke, karaoke's very young American-born cousin, which is trying to find its footing in a small, cluttered East Village basement club about the size of an aspiring actor's studio apartment.
Anastasia Fite, 24, is an aspiring director and screenwriter who, for now, pays the bills by running the club, the Den of Cin, a basement party-rental room at 44 Avenue A, at Third Street, beneath the Two Boots video store and pizza parlor. She is hostess for the weekly movie nights. She is usually also the bartender, the operator of the DVD remote control and as far as she knows the inventor of movieoke, which came to her late last summer in a burst of low-budget creativity.
The concept almost explains itself: instead of making a fool of yourself singing in front of strangers, you do it by acting in front of a movie screen with the sound turned low. Ms. Fite said she came up with the idea because she often had to keep order during children's parties and would sometimes jump up in front of the movie screen and act out scenes from "Monsters, Inc." to make the children laugh.
This was all second nature to her. She is a self-described movie addict who grew up in Los Angeles, attended a performing-arts high school and weaned herself on endless viewings of "Dirty Dancing," "Saturday Night Live," and for some reason "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." ("I love that movie," she said.)
At Cornell she made a movie short about a kind of cartoon version of herself, a girl whose only way of communicating was speaking movie lines. "I wrote the script using dialogue from all of my favorite movies from all of the ages — "Badlands" to "Johnny Guitar" to "Red River" to "All About Eve" to "In a Lonely Place," she said.
In her student movie, the girl can connect only with a video-store clerk who understands all of her references. But then, tragically, she begins to forget her lines and cannot communicate with anyone. In a way, Ms. Fite said, movieoke is the opposite of that experience, a means to allow people who "are married to our television sets" and whose personalities are basically a pastiche of pop-culture references to get together, drink and put some of that hard-won knowledge to good use.
On a recent Wednesday night it was clear those attracted by this idea were nervous about actually trying it themselves.
A little after 9 p.m. there were few participants in the basement room, which resembles a 1950's suburban dad's rec room, except with the Clash playing in the background. Ms. Fite had assembled a stack of popular DVD's on the bar, for patrons to choose from. (Scenes from "The Breakfast Club," "The Matrix," and "Pulp Fiction" became favorites.)
After Mr. Roberts did his Gollum scene, there was a dangerous lull in the room. So Ms. Fite, dressed all in white — she says she dresses that way so her body itself helps serve as a screen for the movie, which streams from a DVD projector — leaped onstage to do a favorite scene, a Jennifer Beals dance sequence from "Flashdance."
To keep things going, Ms. Fite has also been known to act out a scene from the cult British film "The Wicker Man," in which a naked woman essentially seduces a wall. "She's naked, I'm not," Ms. Fite points out.
For "Flashdance," she cued up the scene with her remote control, and started mimicking Ms. Beals's moves with so much comic flair that during a kind of half-splits, Ms. Fite split something herself.
"My pants just ripped," she announced, grabbing a pillow from a nearby couch for cover."Does anybody have any pants I can borrow?" (She was saved by safety pins.)
The moment warmed up the room, however, and over the next hour people rose to do scenes from several movies, including "Old School," "Swingers" and a hilarious scene from the camp horror movie "Evil Dead II," in which a character battles his own possessed hand, finally cutting it off with a chain saw.
Matthew Dujnic, 29, a movieoke regular, played the scene to the hilt, employing paper plates and a plastic knife as props. "Does anybody have anything resembling a chain saw?" he asked . Mr. Dujnic, a cartoonist and computer programmer, may be Ms. Fite's ideal movieoke subject: shameless and so full of movie lines that he could almost qualify as a film nerd. He swears that he can do nearly all of "Glengarry Glen Ross" from memory.
There are still some technical bugs with movieoke that Ms. Fite said she needed to fix. Some participants are unsure whether to watch the video screen to read the dialogue or turn around to watch the actors on the screen, so they sometimes do neither and just look embarrassed as the film projects onto their bodies and people stare.
But movieoke mostly works, as an almost logical extension of fame-obsessed karaoke culture. While it may have actually begun years ago with fans acting out scenes from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" in theaters, it now seems to have come fully of age. And Ms. Fite is working hard to legitimize her claim to having invented it.
"This is just the beginning, and this venue is just my first stop," she said, explaining that she had hired lawyers to try to protect her rights to the concept, and that she was considering trying to license movie clips for a kind of movieoke kit.
"I do anticipate it going globally and big," she said, sounding as confident as a young mogul and already beginning to think like one. (When a reporter initially called Ms. Fite, she said, "I was wondering when you guys would call." And the night the reporter visited her club, a camera crew from CNN and a local network affiliate also showed up.)
As with all good ideas, there is already competition. A California software company has made what it calls "Movie Karaoke," a CD-ROM that includes scenes from "American Pie" and other movies and allows computer users to dub their voices over scenes.
But Ms. Fite is undeterred. "I want to direct movies, so hopefully I can make a little change out of this and do so," she said. "That's where this all comes from."
Even if it does not work out, she said, at least she is not working as a waitress right now. "I feel like I'm cheating. I've actually managed to never listen to anybody for my entire life. My mom's like: `Get a 9 to 5. Take a math and science class. You're going to have to start waking up early one of these days.' "
"And I just kept doing what I wanted to do," she said. "And finally it seems to be O.K."