Charlies House!

[Bobby]

Firstly I'd like to say hello and thank you to Andrew and everyone at the Bad Movies site / forum, it is amazing. I think I've spent the last nine days straight finding old movies and watching them with various groups of friends.

I'm a new kid to the forum and I thought I'd start with a fun one... I'm helping a friend with a University project. We're hoping to create our own short film out of a montage of sound and video, piecing together (hopefully) thousands of lines from different films. We've set ourselves the restraint of one thing, the title 'Charlies House'.

To get to the point I'm looking for any films that contain:

A Character Called Charlie - preferably with a house.
A Spooky Haunted House - preferably it being more about the actual house than the 'thing' in it.
Pimps .sigh. (see below) - preferably as cocky and self loving as a pimp can come.

Plus any funny lines you think have to go in! I've found some brilliant comments reading through some other posts on here that I'm definitely going to use. I want to keep it quite vintage looking and sounding, Horror / Comedy in feel and... my friend wants me to try and have a 'pimp' character, maybe even as Charlie himself (I'm not so keen on the idea but it'd be fun to try)

Obviously I'm not expecting you guys to do all the work, but any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,

Peas

Bobby

[Flick James]

Welcome to the forum!

If this is a project for pure personal enjoyment that you do not wish to show to anybody, then fine, I'm pretty sure the sky's the limit. However, and far as my limited knowledge goes (and I'm sure our resident lawyer Rev Powell can provide a better answer), if you plan to show it on the University you have to be concerned about copyright infringement.

If you want to avoid that danger altogether, you can stick with only films in the Public Domain. Believe it or not, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a PD film and therefore can be used by anybody. Wikipedia actually has a pretty big list of PD films you can look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States

That's all I've got.

[AndyC]

That's right. I suppose if it's just part of a university course, copyright wouldn't be a big concern, but it would make any public exhibition virtually impossible to do legally. That could be a serious disappointment if it turns out well. Depending on how many different movies are used, acquiring the necessary licensing to do it legally would be a huge job, and potentially expensive. Just getting the rights to show a movie can be a pain, but that would be nothing compared to getting permission to cut together bits of different movies from different owners to make a new movie.

Again, if there's no chance of a public showing, I wouldn't worry about it. But I think it would be sensible to do as Flick James says, and use public-domain movies. In addition to features, there are loads of short educational films in the public domain. I think staying in the public domain would also give the finished movie a fun kitschiness, due to the age and nature of many of the films.

You can find loads of stuff here: http://www.archive.org/details/movies

[Bobby]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. I think public domain is the way to go really. Thanks for the help.

Just another quick question... am I right in thinking that anything over 50 years old gets put in to the public domain or is that just with music?

Also, any suggestions are welcome for films. I'm probably going to make a personal version and one for the project.

Thanks again

[Criswell]

No thats not true. Many old films still have copyrights. A rule of thumb for me is if you can find it on Archive.org its likely Public Domain.
http://www.archive.org/details/moviesandfilms

Welcome to the boards also!