SHOUTING BACK!

The Talkies is the long-time pet project-come true of Tim Massett. Since 2006 it has created an intimate dialogue between the film's director and the audience.

Essentially it takes an idea typically associated with home DVD viewing – an alternate commentary track – and super-charges it. A director joins the theatre's audience for a 35mm screening to provide commentary throughout his or her own film. The audio is at a level that enables the audience to hear both the director and the film. Most important is that it's un-moderated, the film acts more or less as the moderator, which fuels the director's mind to impart anecdotes about the production of the film, taking the viewers down whatever road beckons to them.

THE TALKIES' first guest Herschell Gordon Lewis (a.k.a. "The Godfather of Gore") "talkied" along to a super great print of his classic film Two Thousand Maniacs! and even sold tickets to his own event from the box office of Jacksonville Florida's historic San Marco Theatre.

In May 2007, John Waters joined a sold-out crowd for a screening of this cult hit Polyester—as part of the Jacksonville Film Festival—complete with fabulous Odorama cards for the whole audience.

In February 2008, George Romero joined us for the third installment – freely skipping on down memory lane regarding his seminal work, Night of the Living Dead.

Our fourth event (and first in Minneapolis) was at the lovely Heights Theatre with our friend John Cameron Mitchell, who brought his cult hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

For our fifth installment, Guy Maddin brought his masterful work The Saddest Music in the World to Minneapolis.

In 2012, The Talkies moved back to Jacksonville and into the newly formed Sun-Ray Cinema and welcomed John Cameron Mitchell back for another round of the Talkies. This time he brought friends from his film Shortbus to join his as they discussed the of making the film. In addition to the standard Talkies event, Mr. Mitchell also presented two films that greatly inspired him as a filmmaker – Albert Brooks' Real Life and Terrence Malick's Badlands.