7:15 pm, $10/$8 members
Queen: A Night in Bohemia, 1 hr 30 min | Music
Heavy Metal Parking Lot, 17 min | Documentary, Short, Music
Queen: A Night in Bohemia is the newly restored and re-mastered concert, filmed live on Christmas Eve 1975 at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. “The film captured Freddie Mercury, Brian May and the band firing on all cylinders as they performed breakthrough hits like Killer Queen, Liar, Keep Yourself Alive, Now I’m Here, and We Are the Champions as well as the now monumental classic Bohemian Rhapsody. It sealed Queen’s transition from ambitious upstarts into one of the biggest and most important bands of the era.”
This release combines the concert film with never-before-seen archive footage and interviews with all four members of the band.
To kick off the evening, Rosendale Theatre will precede Queen with a special screening of the seminal short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot, produced in 1986.
Heavy Metal Parking Lot documents heavy metal music fans tailgating in the parking lot outside the Capital Centre (which was demolished in December 2002) in Landover, Maryland before a Judas Priest concert.
The film claims a unique place in film history and Rosendale Theatre has a special connection to the film.
Pam Kray is on the Rosendale’s Programming Committee. In the early 80s, she was part of a Washington, D.C. art and film collective called I AM EYE, along with future Heavy Metal Parking Lot filmmakers Jeff Krulik and John Heyn.
As Pam describes it, “From a casual gathering of film nerds to a full and networked scene for underground film and video, I AM EYE engendered a loyal group of mostly super-8 filmmakers. We held screenings twice a month for nine years—films from NYC, San Francisco, Germany and France–and the network grew by word of mouth.”
“One night in October 1986, one of our video regulars, John Heyn, came in with a 17-minute film that he and Jeff Krulik had made. It was titled, Heavy Metal Parking Lot. The rest, as they say, is history. Heavy Metal Parking Lot started trading on VHS like wildfire. It is thought of as one of the earliest viral videos. Now, in its thirtieth anniversary year, it is making the rounds of theaters and even opened the SXSW festival in Austin, TX.”
In fact, Pam was the projectionist for the first-ever screening of this now classic work in American documentary, and she has invited the filmmakers, John Krulik and John Heyn, to join us by Skype at the beginning of the evening (both nights, July 12 and 13) to get the party started.
Queen: A Night in Bohemia and Heavy Metal Parking Lot will be the 19th and 20th films in Rosendale Theatre’s on-going curated Music Fan Film Series, unique in the Hudson Valley.
The series has presented documentaries, feature films and concert films, ranging from the 50th anniversary re-release of A Hard Day’s Night to The Wrecking Crew, Amy, The Amazing Nina Simone, and Purple Rain.
You could say we’re in a golden age of music films of all kinds, mining the lives of artists across the entire spectrum of our collective musical history. A sub-committee of Rosendale Theatre’s Programming Committee has undertaken the challenge of identifying the best of the new releases, as well as classics that continue to resonate with the culture. And while some of the films in the series can be found on the small screen, it is the committee’s belief that showing these films on the big screen, with big sound (we do up the volume for this series), surrounded by other music fans, is a significant contribution to the music & film scene in the Hudson Valley–and our audiences have confirmed this. During the past year, the series has settled into a film every month.