Bad movies, good cause.

My birthday is January 31, which is Friday. I will be celebrating this year by participating in the Sidewalk Film Festival’s Bad Movie Marathon. The Sidewalk fest happens every year in lovely downtown Birmingham, Alabama, so it’s my local film festival. I’ve been attending it nearly half my life at this point. Sidewalk is also one of the big reasons I am a filmmaker. Chuck and I attended the very first Sidewalk in the late 1990s, and that was the first time we realized if we made a movie, someone might screen it.

My birthday is January 31, which is Friday. I will be celebrating this year by participating in the Sidewalk Film Festival’s Bad Movie Marathon. The Sidewalk fest happens every year in lovely downtown Birmingham, Alabama, so it’s my local film festival. I’ve been attending it nearly half my life at this point.

Sidewalk is also one of the big reasons I am a filmmaker. Chuck and I attended the very first Sidewalk in the late 1990s, and that was the first time we realized if we made a movie, someone might screen it. (This was years before everybody just shot movies and posted them to YouTube.)

Chuck and I had a short film in the third (I think — it was a long time ago) Sidewalk festival, and over the years Sidewalk has shown a few more of our shorts plus all three of our feature films (Hide and Creep, Interplanetary, and For a Few Zombies More, in case you’re new here).

Sidewalk now runs an excellent cinema in downtown Birmingham. And they’ve been doing a bad movie marathon at the cinema for a few years now. Participants compete to see who can watch the most bad movies (and stay awake — no naps!), and in the process they try to get folks to donate money to support the Sidewalk film fest and cinema. (Both the fest and cinema are non-profit affairs.)

Which bad movies will we be watching? We don’t know yet — that’s part of the fun! The promotional material for the Bad Movie Marathon includes images from The Room and Showgirls, but I am expecting a wide variety of bad movies from different eras and genres.

I’ve been wanting to do the Bad Movie Marathon since it started, but each year I’ve missed it for one reason or another. But it looks like I will finally get to participate this year, and it’s a nice bonus that the marathon starts the evening of my birthday.

The record for the Bad Movie Marathon is apparently like five days — that’s over 100 hours of bad movies! I’m gonna go ahead and tell you, I won’t make it five days. I’ll be lucky to make it 24 hours — I am happy to watch bad movies (and many would say I’ve made some bad movies myself), but staying awake for days on end is a young person’s game.

I’m excited to give it a shot, though. And I’m glad that my pal James Brown will be teaming up with me (and hopefully helping me stay awake).

If you’d like to support me in the marathon and, more importantly, support the Sidewalk film fest and cinema, please contribute using this link. There are also some fun sponsorship opportunities — stuff like food delivery for marathoners or a round of shots for marathoners (though the latter sounds like something that would make me fall asleep even faster).

And if you’d like to see the marathon from the comfort of your own home, you can get a viewer ticket. Well, you can’t watch the movies from home — that would probably break some copyright laws. But you can watch the marathoners’ reactions to the movies. Which is bound to provide some entertainment value.