The Secret Cinema

Death Race 2000 director Paul Bartel's debut feature is this short film. Its about a young woman whose life is disastrous - crap job, annoying mother, useless boyfriend, etc. To make matters worse wherever she goes, she gets the feeling she's being watched. Well, it turns out she's right! As her every move is being surreptitiously filmed and then edited together and shown weekly at the Secret Cinema where the audience can laugh at her expense. This is a pretty effective bit of strangeness and is definitely worth 30mins of your time.

An influential (in it's time), inventive 30 minute black and white short that examined an 'Ed TV' like idea way before others did. A woman has her life secretly filmed, edited and shown to a laughing audience each week. Far more surreal and stylized than the features and TV shows that later used this concept, it's stylish, a lot of fun and effectively creepy. On the other hand, the acting is amateurish, production values nonexistent, and the post dubbed sound is pretty awful. But somehow, that homemade quality sort of works with the story. Worth seeing if you have any interest in the semi-experimental late 60s cinema that combined what would have been sleaze with far more artistic aspirations (Brian DePalma, Bartel, and many others were part of this art/exploitation film trend).

Jane is a single secretary in NYC. Her boss Mr. Troppogrosso is pushing her to go on a date with him. Her boyfriend Dick dumps her. Her mother tells her about a secret cinema. She starts to suspect her life is being filmed. Her best friend coworker Helen prepare her for the date with a ridiculous hairdo. She finds a cinema showing her life with many people she knows in attendance. She faints and the cinema is gone. She goes to her therapist desperate for help.

It's a wonderful no-budget 30 minute short from the warped mind of Paul Bartel. The idea of a personal reality show is not mainstream yet and it's not until 1998 that 'The Truman Show' is released. It's an inventive idea from left field. The low budget feel actually works for this movie giving it an underground tone. Amy Vane is awesome and it's too bad that she didn't continue to act. This is fun little movie.

Three decades ago, a young, up-and-coming movie director named Paul Bartel pulled together a lot of shoestrings to produce this wonderfully resourceful little black comedy (less than 30 minutes long) about Jane, an office secretary who comes to realize that her life is being secretly filmed for a shadowy outfit called The Secret Cinema. Some critics have pointed to what they see as a striking similarity between this film and "The Truman Show." But there's at least one crucial difference: Whereas Truman Burbank's environment is completely fabricated, Jane's life in New York is very real, although it's being manipulated by the filmmakers.

Bartel uses his budgetary and technical limitations to excellent advantage: the cheap-looking black & white photography, the obviously looped dialogue, the stock music and canned sound effects are very much in keeping with this low-budget movie about low-budget moviemaking.

Bartel later remade "The Secret Cinema" as an episode of Steven Spielberg's NBC anthology series "Amazing Stories." The remake starred Penny Peyser as Jane, Griffin Dunne as Dick and Bartel himself as Jane's psychiatrist. The NBC version was, I thought, terrible; it was over-produced, over-written and over-acted, and totally lacking the charm of the original. Worst of all, it failed to adequately convey the story's basic premise that Jane's life was being secretly filmed. (The remake also offers an ending completely different from the darkly humorous resolution of the first film.)

Okay, you've chanced to see something that sticks in your craw after gawd only knows how many decades - much like "Eclipse of the Sun Virgin" and a few other rarities from the day of true "underground" film. So you decide to check it out on IMDb just to see if anyone else has had the same grace and seen this movie. And you find out that it has already been filtered and reduced to some pablum for the masses already, and for TV, no less. Leave this gem alone, Mr Spielberg. The black and white ORIGINAL is so powerful and fun and dark that doing anything with the content or.... needless to say, Hollywood seems to have run out of ideas, or original ideas, or any means to make a buck without investing a whole lot of energy (as I see it). This wonderful movie should be on any serious film buff's list of must sees. Are you paranoid? This movie gives credence to anyone and all of us who have felt that there ain't an inch of life left to ourselves and that your meager little life is an open book for other's amusement - and our personal horror. Love love love this film.