EVENTS
1970 Drama, 84 minutes color
with Ryan Listman, Joy Bang, Frank Cavestani, Marsha Rossa.
Produced, written and directed by
FRED BAKER
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“EVENTS is without question, the most far-out sexually experimental film made in the sixties or seventies.” --Bruce Williamson, Playboy |
"In 1968, 69, there were a lot of young runaway flower-kids in the Village into freer, more open, sexuality who could use a few bucks to pay the rent, buy some pot, whatever. I was a moonlighting 8mm loop-porno shooter--with a 16mm Bolex, shooting double-8mm on reversal 16mm raw stock (forward & back)--for a mob guy named Spanish Louey who distributed the (then illegal) 8mm copies throughout the USA and Canada.
Louey was paying me two thousand dollars a day or night shoot and as any hooker world-wide would tell you–"It put food on the table for my kids"....but I really only wanted to make shocking but serious independent films and shooting porno twice a week, albeit a living, was boring into my own sex life and not enough intellectual juice for me, and, besides--what I was living through (with my wife and kids,) trying to make the filmmaker deal work financially to raise a family was in itself a pretty hectic story I wanted to tell.
So, after annoying him for weeks on end, Spanish Louey, finally, gave me $25,000 in a lump sum from under a radiator in his office, and, at actual risk to my life and limbs, in late 1969, I made EVENTS, this totally improvised dramatic street feature, my first full length film.
Luckily, when I finished editing it and screened it at the Elgin Theatre @ Midnite (also an industry first) for the trade and friends in 1970, Grove Press' Barney Rossett loved it, and there and then, bought it for his Grove Press Film Department for $300,000.00.
Whew! Spanish Louey was extremely happy with his $125,000 profit..so were my arms and legs!"
..from "Making Movies, Some Notes"
by Fred Baker
by Fred Baker
