This already ran on MCN as part of my weekend review of the Los Angeles Film Fest, but the other stuff I covered seems to be getting a lot of attention and this doesn’t. It’s not the best film at the fest, but it is a wonderful project and Chick Tracts (I just bought the entire current collection for under 20 bucks and am looking forward to it arriving on my doorstep) are a great part of Americana. So….
Luke Y Thompson, New Times‘ tallest, most tattooed, most multi-color haired critic and he told me about the film he was most anticipating on the entire schedule… Hot Chicks.

Somehow, as
I was jamming through the online catalog for the festival, I just
went right past Hot Chicks. But had I been paying closer
attention, I would have been almost as enthusiastic as Luke. The
screening was of 9 short films, each based on one of what are known
as Chick Tracts. They are those little cartoon booklets that you
have probably had handed to you on the streets of some part of town
where souls are in need of saving. These mini-comics were all written
and drawn by Jack T. Chick. According to
his website, over 500 million of these things have been sold
to groups and distributed across the globe. 500 million!

My memory is
of getting these from Jews For Jesus followers. Others remember
other religious groups handing them out. The clever thing is, they
are so cheap to purchase (15 cents) that they make an impressive
handout. And they are all stories of salvation that end with an
admonition to accept Jesus into your life.

So I settled
into my seat at The Crest to see the films and quickly found out
that the folks who made the films were all friends and had all spurred
each other on to make these films over the last 5 or 6 years. Each
film has a distinctly different style, including two of the films
that were made by the same team. One of these films by Rodney
& Syd recreated the Chick
Tract "Titanic" using the Jim Cameron film,
Titanic. Their second film, based on the
tract, Somebody
Goofed, was one of my favorite of the nine. They essentially
take the drawn images in the Chick
Tract and bring them to life in very clever animation.

The films that
stuck closest to the tracts were probably my favorites. All of the
films adhered to the idea that Chick’s words would be the script
and that the tracts would serve, to some degree, as storyboards.
But styles varied widely. What was fascinating was how each filmmaker
(many are first time filmmakers) decided to do their interpretation.
For instance, the first film, Bewitched?
(by Tim Kirk – Chick
Tract), used puppets to tell its story of how television infects
the culture. One of the films, Wounded
Children (by Todd Hughes – Chick
Tract), is based on a tract that has been taken off the market
because the morays around child abuse have changed. In that film,
the victimized child is played by a mannequin while everyone around
him is played by adults. Angels?
(by Tommy! – Chick
Tract), the story of a rock-n-roll dream attained and then destroying
the dreamers, is done in a style best described as post-modern Super
8 by way of Kenneth Anger.

Cleo
(by Bryce Ingman – Chick
Tract) is a story about a lost dog who narrowly escapes a dog
pound needle and somehow, amazingly, its owners see this as God’s
intervention and it moves them to being born again. Doom
Town (by P. David Ebersole – Chick
Tract) tells the story of Sodom & Gomorrah. And La
Princesita (by Jamie Tolbert Franklin – Chick
Tract) tells the story of a sick young girl who desperately
wants to go trick-or-treating on Halloween and does and has her
soul saved when one of the neighbors drops a Chick Tract into her
candy bag.

My favorite
of the films, probably because it is most precisely a Chick
Tract come to life, was Party
Girl, directed by Anonymous. Why anonymous? Because there is
some fear that Jack Chick, who is still alive at 82, might
get all litigious on their collective asses.

The filmmaker
actually gave me permission – after some pleasant harassment – to
publish her name. But after seeing how often the Chick Publications
sends out cease and desists, I have decided to keep it to myself.
She is an actress, remarkably beautiful, very sharp, surprisingly
unflinching about the truth, terribly well married and, by amazing
coincidence, did a guest spot on a Sunday night primetime TV show
that I Tivo’d.

(In another
odd showbiz small world coincidence, a guy playing in an old friend’s
charity poker tourney on Sunday was pitching a local stage show
starring this woman’s husband. And almost more oddly, I had dinner
with this woman’s ex-husband just a week ago – and I had never before
met this woman or had any social conversation with this man until
these two meetings. High school with money indeed!)

I don’t know
if she has a future as a director based on this short, satirical
film but, like I said before… concept is everything on these
and, to me, she got the inherent joke of Chick Tracts best of all,
so much so that the film could really be seen as a positive and
believing take on a Chick Tract if your beliefs went that way.

The bottom line
is, this group has no interest in distributing their films for any
revenue. (Fact is, very few of them could get clearances on their
pre-recorded music or images from other media.) They aren’t even
posting their films to their
website. They screened at LAFF and will show again at Outfest
at midnight on July 8. From there, who knows.

Anyway…
I am going to go out on a limb and post a short clip from Anonymous’
film, Party Girl. It is four pieces from her work, slapped
together shoddily via QT Pro. But it’ll give you some idea…
and it makes me smile like crazy. Here
is the 3mg QT file…

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