JACK: There should always be more movies made. I’ve had that discussion with people, too. I’ve never had any desire to make a movie myself because you can sink all your money into it and take ten years and all your time and energy and draw in all your friends to help you and it might not be a good movie. Also, I don’t have any money, so that’s the base of it.
MARGARET: I’m getting the idea that it’s not fair to say you’re just into sleazy, shocking exploitation things. What you really like are films from a certain era, and a lot of films from that era are that way. You’re more of a historian.
JACK: Right! But it’s the medium, too. Because I don’t like videos. I don’t like these videos people are always trying to push on me. “You’ve got to see this unbelievable shit-eating video!” I’m a puritan in a way. And also watching that kind of thing on video makes me feel sleazy in a bad way. I’d rather go in a theater and watch it. Then I’d feel sleazy in the right way. The video is pure voyeurism without the excitement or the aura about it and without other people in the theater. To me, watching video is a sterile way of getting the information.
ALEX: Didn’t you once make a pilgrimage to a factory shown in one of your films?
JACK: Oh, yeah. Tools for Living, the film no one appreciated in Budapest. It’s a religious film made in around 1955. It’s about an evangelical guy who ran an industrial tool factory in Saginaw, Michigan. He had a chapel built into his factory where his employees could listen to him preach from the pulpit and deliver sermons. I’ve watched that a lot of times. It shows a tour of the factory and areas around it. When I was driving across the country I made a small detour of about 300 miles and drove to the factory. Drove through the parking lot, stopped, walked around, looked around, got back in and took off. It was raining that night. I got a hotel room in Saginaw and did a lot of serious thinking about my life. The film still connects with me, spiritually.
MARGARET: That film is just as interesting as something like Give the Devil His Due or pornography.
JACK: Right. I’m not really specializing in pornography. Prints that you find in a junk shop in San Francisco are most likely pornographic. There are a lot of obscure tangents that can be followed to the end of time, basically. I’ve dedicated my life to these obscure tangents.
ALEX: Have you ever been inspired to track down specific films?
JACK: Yeah, some of them. Sometimes the trailers are the best parts of the films. It’s a work of archaeology to live in San Francisco. All the labs went out of business, the porno all went to video, and they had to get rid of all the jetsam and flotsam, the paraphernalia. People are selling the stuff here and there. It’s rising to the surface. If you bury a body in a shallow graveyard it will rise up; pretty soon you’ll have an arm or something sticking up out of the dirt. That’s the way I like to think of the film prints in this town. So many of them were made. Some of them are genuinely funny and extremely good. Like any genre there’s a lot of crap and you can’t show most of it to an audience. But some of it is brilliant and nobody knows it. You’ve got to show people the weird stuff. They’re increasingly looking for it.
MARGARET: You come across as a real enigma because of your presentation and style. You have a big luxury car and nice jackets. I can’t figure out how you feel about the films you’re showing.
JACK: Well, being a showman or some sort of aspiring businessman you have to show them something that will keep people awake. I don’t have any politics, basically. I do have opinions on these things that I will vent to people but I would never put through in a show.
MARGARET: It makes it a lot more interesting not to be told what’s going on.
JACK: I know all 12 film freaks in Boston and all 18 of them here. They come to my film shows eventually and I get to know them. They’re like insane or idiot savants or just weird, maladjusted people and I feel a kinship with them. And I’m proud that they come to my shows so I try to give them what they want, whatever that is.
MARGARET: You present them in a real straightforward way. Even when showing the pornography films I always get the feeling you’re a complete gentleman.
JACK: I am! In my own life, personally, I’m more of a puritan. That’s why a lot of these underground types are always trying to give me appalling videos and telling me things and wanting me to come to this and that decadent event. And I’m mortified by a lot of it. I don’t let on to them about it, but it’s the last type of thing I’d get involved with! It’s the sensationalism I like, not the sickness.
MARGARET: The shock stuff is really one-dimensional. It only tries to be harder and hardcore pornography. Someone can always go you one step better. There’s always stuff you can’t even imagine. The shit-eating video.
ALEX: Vomit-eating.
MARGARET: There are probably even people who can come up with far worse.
JACK: That’s the whole thing. I think people are increasingly bored and are trying to find something else that’ll just make them feel anything as they sit there watching a video. That’s not at all the dynamic I’m working on.
MARGARET: There’s a lot wider range of stuff you get from your films—like the commercials, those guys trying to sell the ’55 Dodge.
JACK: Right. Because something of the humanity comes out of it. But it’s captured on film.
ALEX: “The taut eager beauty of the sleek designs”?
JACK: Right. I can recite that in my sleep.
ALEX: When you show a film a bunch of times you start making a bunch of funny comments. You’re responding to the movie.
JACK: Yeah, because I’ve seen some of them 50 times. I’ve seen these movies so many times it’s unhealthy.
ALEX: The People Next Door, for instance?
JACK: There are a lot of people walking around town who’ve only seen the first reel of it. I like to take these extremely unlikely movies and turn them into cult movies. The whole world of cult movies, where people are fanatics about a certain movie and know all the dialogue, it’s like a religion.
Video has destroyed the whole cult thing. Some people tell me about video, “I can’t see the movies because my town doesn’t have any movie theaters. I have to watch video.” I tell them, “Leave the town and move to the city. There are movie theaters here.” They say, “Well, I have a job here and a family here.” I say, “Leave your family and leave your job!” I have no sympathy for these people! They make their choices.
ALEX: How did you feel about what Jacques Boyreau was doing about a year ago, showing two movies at once? Weren’t you doing that?
JACK: I think multiple projections should happen more often. We certainly didn’t invent it. Back in the ’60s a million people were doing it. It needs to be revived. People have gotten into this video mode, wanting to collect and own. But film is so much more than that. You can do outdoor shows, multiple-projection shows, images over each other, all sorts of things you can’t do with video. If I had my own theater, which is my goal, I would do stuff like that, or whatever would be possible.
ALEX: You’d rather stay in one place? You travel around a lot now.
JACK: Right now I travel around a lot because my girlfriend lives in Denmark so I spend a lot of time there. And I can make money traveling the circuits in Germany and Holland. They have more access to money. When I come back here I struggle, but here’s where I get the films and the programs. San Francisco has a film scene, in addition to a rock and roll scene. Every city can get some rock band up there and draw 500 people. But to have a large crowd come out for a film show is different. To put on weird film shows and freak people out, to throw a curve ball, big curve balls that’ll knock ’em into the gutter, that would be my ideal. It’s hard to explain the atmosphere that would be at a really good, mind-bending film show. It would have to be a big screen with good sound to overwhelm their senses. That’s what movies are about, to me, just overwhelming their senses. Crushing them.
ALEX: Can you describe the difference between a film and a video?
