Midnight screenings converted a festival’s hippie crowds into a film’s cult audience

Evidence

Fortuitously, the Elgin was hosting Jonas Mekas’s 7¾ New York Film Festival, featuring new or newish films by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol, as well as Jack Smith’s (formerly No) Slave President. Three of the seven programs were devoted to films by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Barenholtz took advantage of the hippie crowds to announce an added feature. Starting December 18, El Topo would be playing midnights because, as put by a single ad in the Voice, it was “too heavy to be shown any other way.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1678

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete instance of the scene-turns-into-market mechanism the reader is tracking — the film festival’s counterculture audience becomes the seed market for a commercial midnight run.