When screenwriter/poet/novelist James Robert Baker’s BLONDE DEATH premiered at the five-month-old EZTV Video Gallery on October 6, 1983, it instantly became the closest thing the space had to a “hit,” playing as a late-night movie for months before later returning with Ken Camp’s HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS as part of a program timed with the 1984 Summer Olympics called “American Perversions”. Despite largely being an outside production, BLONDE DEATH has since gone on to become the most enduring and recognizable work to have come out of EZTV – and, in the years following Baker’s passing in 1997, has grown into an honest-to-god cult classic. In that respect, it represents the closest realization of founder John Dorr’s original utopian vision for the organization.

For this program, we’ll present brand-new restorations of the long-unavailable original cut of BLONDE DEATH, Baker’s notorious UCLA Project One film MOUSE KLUB KONFIDENTIAL, and an unseen solo comedy video from 1981, all from recently uncovered materials drawn from the late film- and videomaker’s archives.

Jim Baker MOUSE KLUB KONFIDENTIAL (1976, 15 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP)
An exposé of the shocking life of M*useketeer-turned-gay bondage pornographer Buddy Wilson (Ken Camp). Are Wilson and his degenerate films merely an aberration, or is there more to “the happiest place on Earth” than meets the eye?

Jim Baker THE BRADY BUNCH (1981, 10 min, SD-video-to-DCP)
A breaking news update.

James Dillinger
BLONDE DEATH
1983, 100 min, SD-video-to-DCP
“‘Gidget meets Badlands’ is how writer-director James Dillinger describes his visceral, action-packed, black comedy feature. Tammy, a teenage timebomb, arrives in Orange County with her ignorant redneck parents, and eighteen years of bottled-up frustration give way to a summer of lethal excess. Get out the body bags; call in the SWAT team!” –EZTV GUIDE