Saturday, September 15 at 8:00 PM:
The Life Aquatic at Dudas Diving Duds
Beardy adventure in your back yard.
What can I say to make you like Wes Anderson? I can't claim his movies aren't kind of aimless. And it's true that he gets kind of precious sometimes.
But he just has so much fun playing with his settings, his characters, and his details. It's like watching a really,
really imaginative kid use a million-dollar Playmobil set.
In
The Life Aquatic, the million-dollar Playmobil set Wes plays with is the Washed-Up International Documentary Oceanographer: Deluxe Edition, with stocking caps, speedos, and rickety helicopters. And Anjelica Huston. And dolphins with video cameras. And a beardy Bill Murray, who somehow can make loathsome characters lovable.
Hell, just watch the trailer — see how awesome it's gonna be? Because the location is FANTASTIC.
The Venue: Dudas Diving Duds
Evelyn Bartram Dudas (pictured at left) started diving in the 1960s when the sport was new, and met her husband John Dudas on a dive to the recently sunk tanker
Stolt Dagali in 1965.
She's the first woman to dive the
Andrea Dorea, (
here's her account) and — at a time when wetsuits were only made for men — the first to make them for women.
Evelyn and John started Dudas Diving Duds in 1970 in an old barn on the Bartram family property. The company is still there today, hidden in the middle of a suburban development.
Going to school in the area, I walked past Dudas a million times, never suspecting that just behind the row of pine trees was a big stone barn full of sunburned adventurers, incredibly cool equipment and Authentic Deep-Sea Treasure(!!!)
We'll be showing The Life Aquatic in the stone courtyard of the Dudas barn -- an area that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Zissou's Pescespada island. Except that Dudas is REAL, man. It's the REAL DEAL.
Next-Day Report
I had a
great time. 28 people came, including several of Dudas' staff, dressed in red Dudas caps (I did not ask if there were Dudas speedos.) Mike Dudas was incredibly hospitable, throwing an
extension cord over a three-story stone wall so we could power the projector and a rented tripod-mounted inflatable
balloon light.
The balloon light gave a nice, diffuse white glow, allowing Dudas' tank master Toren Peterson to take charge of my just-cobbled-together nitrogen-powered airbrush temporary tattoo gun and administer Gothic Thugg-style tattoos to the movigeoers. Here he is giving a leg tat to Mike Dudas' fiancee Sarah.
The open courtyard of the barn was a nice, mellow atmosphere with a real starry sky instead of a painted moviehouse one. It would have had a nice Mediterranean feel except for the fact that it was
COLLLLD,. And when the inflatable balloon light whirred to life after the end of reel one,
I realized that one of the moviegoers had planted his chair right in the middle of a thicket of poison ivy against the east wall. Say, friend, will you email me and tell me you're alright?
We'll all point to the poison ivy, so you'll know where it is next time:
