The NYT reports on Anastasia Fite's creation of movieoke,
participatory movie acting to movies as karaoke does with
singing.

www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10...10MOVI.html

"Anastasia Fite, 24, is an aspiring director and screenwriter who, for now, pays the bills by running the club, the Den of Cin, a basement party-rental room at 44 Avenue A, at Third Street, beneath the Two Boots video store and pizza parlor. She is hostess for the weekly movie nights. She is usually also the bartender, the operator of the DVD remote control and as far as she knows the inventor of movieoke, which came to her late last summer in a burst of low-budget creativity."

"This was all second nature to her. She is a self-described movie addict who grew up in Los Angeles, attended a performing-arts high school and weaned herself on endless viewings of "Dirty Dancing," "Saturday Night Live," and for some reason "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." ("I love that movie," she said.)

At Cornell she made a movie short about a kind of cartoon version of herself, a girl whose only way of communicating was speaking movie lines. "I wrote the script using dialogue from all of my favorite movies from all of the ages — "Badlands" to "Johnny Guitar" to "Red River" to "All About Eve" to "In a Lonely Place," she said.

In her student movie, the girl can connect only with a video-store clerk who understands all of her references. But then, tragically, she begins to forget her lines and cannot communicate with anyone. In a way, Ms. Fite said, movieoke is the opposite of that experience, a means to allow people who "are married to our television sets" and whose personalities are basically a pastiche of pop-culture references to get together, drink and put some of that hard-won knowledge to good use."

She is trying to license the idea.





The creator also made a student film