Hello, my name's Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with.

Well Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're talking about Julian Compton, who?

Director of such films as Stranded from 1965, Plastic Dome of Norma Jean from 1966, and Buckeye in

blue from 1987.

A little less so that last one.

Yeah, a little bit less so that one.

But listen, over the past decade or so, there's been a great appetite to look beyond

the established film canon, which, as we all know, has largely favored white mealo

tours who work within the system. You know, you've heard it all before. Yeah. There's been a great appetite to excavate the other voices who were sidelined, first maybe by the film industry and then by film history itself. Yeah, once the film industry realized, then we can't make too much money off these movies people have never heard of. We can leave it to other people instead. One such recent rediscovery has been Julian Compton, who directed only three movies,

the two most important of which never received any kind of home video release. Yeah, so you could

not see them unless you went to the UCLA Archives. Right. And the UCLA Film Archive recently restored

them. I think they first screened at the Metrograph in 2017. And they were just released on a

beautiful Blu-ray by Flickr Alley. It was a historian named Maya Montanias Smuckler,

who recently wrote a book called Liberating Hollywood Women Directors and the Feminist

Reform of 1970s American Cinema.

For her dissertation, I believe, she was reading about 70s and 60s female film directors

in America, and there was this one name that was like, who's this?

Yeah, she does what I love doing, going through like encyclopedias of little bios and things

like that, maybe looking at newspapers from the era, And she saw this name and she saw that this person had directed two feature films. And she went, I've never heard of this person before. And because it's particularly interesting, I think, because like if you're like her, you know the names of, there are so few women directed movies in America in the 70s and 60s. Like, you know the names of every single one. So if one occurs, that's like, fuck, that's like 30% of the people. It's like, wait, wait, what? How is this possible? I mean, it's very possible if the film gets no distribution, that it will never be seen. Her 1966 film, the Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, is probably the most known one now. It recently screened at the Tiff Lightbox here. I think our friend Peter programmed it there. Oh, yeah. Peter Koppowski's been a big supporter of this film. I remember him telling me this when he had to watch it like at UCLA. That's the only way they would let him see it. And he's like, you got to see this.

And I have to assume that another reason why these movies never quite entered film history

...