Underground film premieres were staged as deliberately anti-spectacular brunchtime events

Evidence

Dead of winter 1969: Jack Smith had a new film! Nearly five years since Flaming Creatures was busted, two years since Smith last showed rushes from his never completed Normal Love, two weeks after Richard Nixon’s inauguration (and the Mobilization Committee to End the War’s despondent “counter inaugural”), No President had its first public screening. Rather than midnight, it was presented at brunchtime—11:15 a.m., Sunday morning, February 2—at the Elgin, a moldering 600-seat movie house on the corner of Nineteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1367

Categorization

• CANDY: A noon Sunday screening of an avant-garde film is a fun, tweetable detail about the counterculture’s rejection of midnight-spectacle norms.