About a decade ago I had one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life. Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek was doing a retrospective of director Joe Dante’s work and as part of it, they held an ultra-rare screening of one of the greatest unreleased movies in history: The Movie Orgy.

Made by Dante in the late 1960s when he was still in college, it’s a massive compilation of films, commercials, newsreels, and all sorts of other cinematic detritus. Its length has fluctuated over the decades — at one point it was over seven hours long, but the version screened at BAM was more like five hours long — but at any length the film is funny and strange and fascinating. It also basically invented the idea of YouTube compilations about 40 years before YouTube was even invented. When I saw it at BAM I wr

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