Fools! Infidels!

Teenagers from Outer Space, "Toast to Our Brother," and "Island Sunrise." Outfest Legacy Project Screening Series. UCLA Film & Television Archive. Hammer Museum. 5/17/09.

The Outfest Legacy Project's tribute to Tom Graeff was awesome! I totally expected there to be huge crowd of '50s scifi fans with lobsters and Rocky Horror-like responses. Instead he audience was a couple dozen queer film enthusiasts (including some cute girls! yay!). The whole event was fabulously entertaining and educational and you (in a vague, general sense) are all fools for missing it!

The thing I found most notable about this screening of Teenagers from Outer Space was the large amount of Gargon action. There were totally more giant lobsters than I remember in previous viewings of the film.

The fabulous Gargon

I learned lots of things at this screening, including the fact that David Love, star of Teenagers from Outer Space, aka Chuck Roberts was Graeff's boyfriend at the time of filming; he disappeared completely in 1959. Ooh! Mystery!

David Love, star and boyfriend to the director

In addition to Teenagers, which is totally better on the big screen, we also watched Graeff's short film about fraternity life, "Toast to Our Brother," which wasn't as homoerotic and campy as I had hoped, but it was still pretty entertaining. It was fun to watch footage filmed on the UCLA campus in the '50s. The short "Island Sunrise" was even more educational; it was intended to be a showcase of the talents of Chuck Roberts and it was strange and depressing short supposed to be about eternal love. It was apparently set to the song "Ebb Tide" but this particular screening was done to Erasure's version of the song, which I suspect gave the whole thing a very different feel.

But the most exciting tidbit that I learned at this film screening was that the last film Graeff worked on was Wizard of Mars, a 1965 scifi version of the Wizard of Oz. According to IMDB the tagline for the film is "Three EARTHMEN and a GIRL encounter the horrors of MARS!" Doesn't that sound awesome!?! We definitely need this for bad scifi night! Of course, it could be as dull as Robinson Crusoe on Mars but I think it's worth checking out.