Open Screen Night

Inspired by open mic nights at your local coffee house, Alamo programmer Henri Mazza decided to put together the best bring-your-own-video night that's going on anywhere in the country. The concept is simple: we will show anything you bring with you. Anything at all. That's the whole point, see. You bring in a tape or a DVD, and then we all watch it together on the big screen. You can bring in an old Lego animation you made when you were 8, your thesis film from college, or a church youth group training video that you bought off of Ebay. Anything you'd like to show an audience. Anything at all.
We do have a couple of rules that help us keep the show running smoothly, but nothing that limits the types of things you can show.

Rule #1: At most Open Screen Nights, we don't play any tape longer than 8 minutes long. Lots of people bring stuff in, and we've only got two hours, so we don't let you bogart the whole evening with a rough cut of your feature film. Once every three months, though, we hold a special "Long Form Edition" of Open Screen Night, and at that show we'll play anything for up to 20 minutes.

Rule #2: Sometimes, people bring in horribly unentertaining movies that could only possibly be funny to the people involved in making the video. To make sure that the audience is involved and gets a show that's fun to watch, we bring in a gong to each show and put it up on the stage at the front of the theater. At the beginning of the program, we pick one random person in the audience to be our official gonger of the evening and then hand that lucky someone the mallot. Every video gets 2 minutes to play with a quiet audience watching closely, and during that first 2 minutes it can not be gonged. After our stopwatch hits 2:01, though, the official gonger can get up out of his seat, walk down to the front of the theater, and whack the gong with the official mallot. Anytime that happens, we stop whatever we're showing and move on to the next randomly selected tape. We have a rowdy audience, too, so generally after the two minutes is up, they'll boo and yell out for the gonger to do their bidding. The final call, however, rests in the hands of the person with the mallot. That person can gong a movie that everyone loves if he so chooses, or he can let a movie run that everyone's booing. It's all up to the gonger.

Chronicle article by Sarah Hepolah on Open Screen Night.

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