Warped and Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive

“The most comprehensive guide to the movies that were my film school!”  – Bill Lustig, director of MANIAC and MANIAC COP, founder of Blue Underground At the dawn of this century a small, scrappy one-screen theater in Austin Texas became ground zero for a revolution in film exhibition. That cinema, the Alamo Drafthouse, took the seemingly foolhardy step of offering free screenings of exploitation and horror movies that had quite literally been consigned to the scrap heap. The idea began in the sleep-deprived mind of its co-founder Tim League as he piloted a grotesquely overloaded rental truck home to Texas with hundreds of otherwise unwanted film prints in the back, an expense he could ill-afford. Why not, he thought, offer a screening series at the theater that would allow everyone who was interested discover these movies simultaneously as they unfolded on screen in all their speckled, splicey glory? And why not make it free? From that fevered notion, a legend was born. The series, Wei