of popcorn i'm marilyn campbell and i have been moderating tonight and with us tonight is a special guest randy sherman who runs a film kind of club in montgomery and also our regular panelist janet faired and we're going to talk to randy about running a film club and how one goes about that so first of all tell us a little bit about how this started well it call and slowly i started to think you know i should do this at home so we started doing it at home outside and then the neighbors started getting involved and we invite the neighbors and all the kids and we'd watch movies like e t or camp rock some of the stuff the kids would like and then all of a sudden other people would say to me oh we should come over and march a movie with you some more thought movie not the kids stuff so we just we started doing that and then two and a half years ago three years ago we watched one every said oh that's great we talked about the movie it was going to sell me frankenstein it was during hollowing we tried to pick a theme of the movie and they said oh what's that other was and we just discontinued and i've been doing this for two and a half years now and it was only maybe six people the first movie and work through word of mouth people started hearing about it and oh i'd love to go see that so i have about thirty thirty five people in my group we get about twelve to sixteen at any night because not everybody can make every every night it's once a month once a month and how do you communicate with your group i mean you send out a like a group e mail and saying it's going to be thursday night i usually it's the day i pick i do it all on facebook so ninety percent of everybody that i have in my group has a facebook account so they're invited to the group  a couple of people have e mail so i send them private emails but i just post it the date i put the trailer on there a little description of what the movie is and sometimes will do surveys i'll say all right it's summer let's pick a holiday movie and i'll just send out a survey of which what your favorite holidays are and let them pick and we usually try to keep the going when you get the movies from i get ninety percent of them i get from the public library ok i just asked to be in the group who you don't know and do you get that that's a no i never had anybody ask usually it's not that i didn't know usually it's through a friend and actually i should i should change that because a lot of the people that started i twin brother and it was really both of our ideas to get this started but we did it at my house because i had the equipment and so i got to meet a lot of his friends and they just started coming and now we've all become close so i wouldn't even consider them anymore his friends i consider them my friends so it is a nice way to meet them so tell us about your set up at home and how you manage to project at a movie that fifteen or so people can see and hear well it's it started as just borrowing the projector from the governor and mass you know i was i took care of the technology there so i would just bring it home and i put a sheet up on the window and that was it bought the special material that you need for blackout shades and i just use that and i started with that and that left me a few years and after that i decided i was go a little bit bigger so i a friend of mine who's an yeah so it's it's pretty vague so that's the one we use in our tidy you know recreation you know that one i use outside the sixteen foot the smaller one which is probably ten feet eight feet maybe i think it is that we use usually people will bake to search they'll bring appetizers so we'll actually start off with appetizers before the movie starts and then everybody shows up i have included now intermission so that we can all use the and then we continue and finish the movie and then we'll talk a little bit more afterwards and then you know really goes home and we see him in a month later as a discussion to see what did they have to kill a person or is it just everybody jumps in just everybody jumps in and usually that's murder which is my favorite hitchcock movie we did that for october one year we usually do holiday movies at this point marilyn and i hope you don't mind that i'm going to ask randy why why did know no we can definitely get out of that because we were talking about this before you came here and he said he hadn't been asked that before he was not quite sure why he likes it the best he did make one very good point which is you have to see them all to pick the best that's true yeah and here we have a poster tell us how you construct that this well i've been looking all over the internet because i wanted to buy a poster of every poster that alfred hitchcock ever made something like this and i couldn't find it anywhere and i was talking to a friend about this and and i mean the i t business and the developer and he said i just build one yourself and i'm like i never even thought of that just to do it come to my mind so i went and i looked the internet and i searched for every movie poster that he had and i just put them together and made him put it on a screen there's fifty three movies so i could get an even amount so i relationship between him and it's around which was very interesting yeah yeah i mean these are just just visually these are great post and only are they really of ocket of of their different periods yeah this is great that peter lorie with the green face for the met the original man to new to my original one yeah yeah which is similar to the one that's probably my second favorite movie is the man who knew too much the second version the second version yeah ok that we were talking about why you chose the island from what is it what are your criteria well one of the reasons why i really like that movie is i just didn't see the ending coming i didn't get it until it happen that's the definition of suspense that you know who did it and the suspense is knowing how he's going to get caught but that was one of the reasons why i liked it as well as i like john williams who's the actor who plays the police officer and he's done a lot hitchcock yes it is television shows and it's also one of the few alfred hitchcock movies where the police officers are actually look like they're smart most of the movies that he that he's done he makes has a famous interview book with french i interviewed him where he said that this wasn't a great success success commercial success and he he thought it was because there was a line flashback where you think you know who did the murder or shown in a flashback something that turns out to be untrue yes and he says that that was a mistake you can't you can't fool the audience that way they don't like it hitchcock said that yes if he's got said i don't agree with him i think it's i think a lying flashback is is totally ok i would agree with you and that's one of my favorites and i do this two summers ago i decided i'm such a big hitchcock fan the only way to really say what your favorite is everyone has and everyone so i went through two summers ago and i didn't watch everyone but i watched everyone that i had not seen and then some that i really wanted to just refresh my memory and i still to she she will want some with the some of them with me she's not a big har fan so it took me a while to make her realize this is really not hard unless you want to really talk psycho but for the most part of suspense which is different so i've gotten her to see some of that and i actually put another plug out there this week and we went to go see the thirty nine steps which i've never seen and it was actually playing down in p chavis oh which yeah this is from what far it's very it's very accessible on ways that some of the more weird ones are now yes yeah but does your wife is she involved in the group oh she's a yeah i mean it's my wife it's my brother and my brother's wife noticed that most of them are american hollywood made they're not you don't have international or what we consider to be independent art films now it's so how did that decision get made i don't think it really was it just happened you know if i'm originally we really really just focused on trying to pick a theme so you know african style the first one was how we it was october and then we went straight to november and we're like ok what's a good thanksgiving movie and we went to alice's restaurant that almost closed the whole thing down because nobody like that movie it's a great song but the movie has a lot to be desired and then i think one of the life was december and that was a survey and we just slowly kept going going through the holidays and picking themes and it just i guess nobody really knew any foreign you know i mean i guess one of the things i'm getting at is sometimes in independent foreign films there are no tied up endings they're more ambiguous and yeah and i didn't know if you sell your group wouldn't go for that there are some movies that we won't pick  trying to stay a little bit more main mainstream right that i want to try to please everybody who comes in to try to get more people to go so there are some that we've we've thought about you vetoed  families more more independent and sometimes foreign it's hard to it's hard to see a lot of foreign movies or even with montgomery there's not a lot of foreign movies getting to new jersey so independent independent we're lucky in this area to have one camera we are going to show films that are not the types of things that show it's a megaplex is you know have you gotten to the point where if you show something and you hear some disgruntled comments you don't feel bad i really haven't gotten shouldn't feel the only one i've gotten is is alice's restaurant the only one and it became more of a joke than anything else you know so yet now most of the time people people like the movie because honestly if they don't like the movie they're not going to come so i have about thirty thirty two people that i invite and if i get twelve to fifteen at a seating it depends on what movie i pick like seven hundred seventy six i don't think that was as you know there was maybe half a dozen people there but we did casablanca that was a pretty big crowd i did stripes that was a huge crowd a lot of people love that movie  depends on what movie i pick and i but the turnout is so people may not come because they don't care for that they think i'm not going to like that one so i won't come this one yes ok i'm guessing i should say i you know most people don't tell kids age which they're twenty two i think they would call themselves yeah when i first started with the neighborhood they were all you know my kids were a lot younger than all the neighbors kids were a lot younger they were around so they were coming because your parents were coming  our in my neighborhood who does the same thing not a not like you to write a schematic but one to summer he shows a film outdoors i know being white something that he got from where he works and he has the screen you thought i might as well  and he does it once he was a summer and everybody comes in it's fine in this popcorn you know but nobody stays to talk about it that's for sure i don't know why that is but they don't and it's to arab you tell told me when we were talking about this before about how much this kind of a set up cost so if anyone else out there wants to do it can you say a little something about how much investment you made in your equipment then sure so the projector first originally barred from montgomery a mess so i didn't bring that back and forth eventual e i started using one that i had at work my office was closing down or we were moving i should say we're we're moving and a bunch of us did a lot of work to help with the move so what they did was they wanted to get rid of the old equipment they said whoever wants can take it so i took the projector and one point we do get people in the house it broke i went on the internet for forty bucks i got a even a nicer piece of equipment so i use that projector so that was all it cost me a friend of mine who comes came to movie nights he bought me a tripod my engineer friend he bought me a tripod and he put a platform on it so i can now have a better place to put the projector and what about the sound system the sound system i use i got something approach downs and he was a hundred bucks at  time and i just took it to the laptop it's my work laptop or that i use and i just took it up to it and it sounds great outside i do have outdoor speakers all you have the outdoor cigarette but inside we just use a regular you know wireless and it's fine works great so and then to make the screen it was a lot of money it was a few piece of plywood i think the material for the sheet was maybe twenty five bucks i went to  join fabric or something like that and i just bought that one so i have two screens now the other one was a little bit more expensive the big one outside that was a little more expensive to do but at the time to buy blow up screens were like fifteen hundred dollars and i was going to spend the money nowadays they're running a little cheaper so i'm actually thinking there are about one hundred fifty bucks to get a decent one maybe investing next year yeah that's what we always say when we when  i'm involved with that princeton libraries student film festival and when i was young doing film equipment was expensive yeah and and and processing the film was expensive  now with video cameras and digital cameras it's so cheap and they have a setting programs that can edit on a computer and kids can do all kinds of wonderful meet up so you should start showing kids better i don't want to waste a whole week a lot of people go away for the right so friday night the end of the we gets you know whole day they come we drink wine will have beer you know snacks snacks boy i don't like that  which took place during thanksgiving yes it's going on for the thanksgiving week yeah yeah so you know back to school we that's where school rocks coming in right we did ferris bueller's day off last year so there's a lot of  really and so what's your favorite part of doing this i just having everybody over i think you know just i made a lot of new friends from doing this and we've actually extended this and we've done other things usually i'll just post something and say hey this is playing there anybody want to go and get a few people to go you know we've done a bunch of us have done an escape room together oh intro that was a lot of fun  i've done one and hamilton meffert we've done it where we do it every year if i were in my job but every year we bunch of us from work we go together and we're all a lot of us a developer so this is our sop problem solving ok and you see it's called the amazing amazing escape room and i'm so thrilled to meet you too because i know i'm so happy when i hear about people making films a reason for people to get together i'm so happy to hear that yeah yeah i mean so many people get together and talk about films and they're watching you tonight elation on netflix or something and thinking they're getting everything out of it and they're not you know talking about it this great and you learn a lot about from other people's opinion and i've watched a lot of movies from doing this just because somebody else say you should watch this and i you know we're only watching twelve movies a year and so when i want to work something else i watch it on my own right because i've heard about  and i hope you are encouraging other people among our viewers to go in start their own group and do this themselves that is basically want to get in touch with you are you going to let them i'm sure i mean on the air my e mail