Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier
special edition for Roger That! 2021
Men in Orbit (John Lurie, 1979) 
Super 8, 42 min., color, sound
Source: NYU Fales Library & Special Collections
The film is Streaming on Ubu. Eric Mitchell and Lurie play the astronauts. Camerawork by James Nares.
In 1988, Lurie introduced his 1979 film on VH-1’s New Visions.
Notes by J. Hoberman; interview with John Lurie by Andrea Callard
John Lurie’s Men in Orbit is one of a number of short feature-length Super-8 sound films produced mainly in Lower Manhattan during the late ’70s, often by and with musicians. These were exhibited in various galleries and downtown clubs, as well as (transferred to video and projected on a four-by-five Advent screen) at the 50-seat storefront New Cinema on St. Marks Place which is where and how I first saw the 40-minute movie in the spring of 1979, while researching an article for the Village Voice [“No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground,” 5/27/79]. As I wrote then,
The theatre’s premieres have ranged from the neo neo-realism of Charlie Ahearn’s The Deadly Art of Survival (a shoe-string Enter the Dragon shot in and around the Smith housing projects) to the guerrilliere newsreel of Vivienne Dick’s Beauty Becomes the Beast (Teenage Jesus’s Lydia Lunch as a five-year-old child); from the sci-fi povera of John Lurie’s Men in Orbit (slum living-room as space capsule) to the Quaalude surrealism of Michael McClard’s Motive (a punk psychokiller rigs the Museum of Modern Art’s men’s room to electrocute random users).
I did not see the movie with an audience. The New Cinema’s co-founder Eric Mitchell screened some work for me; upon leaving the theater, I was pursued down the block by an agitated John Lurie. (He evidently lived in the vicinity and heard that I was around looking at films). I returned with him to the New Cinema for a special screening and did not regret it. Revisited 32 years later, Men in Orbit strikes me as one of the strongest and most rigorous of No Wave films.
Like certain Warhol movies of the mid-60s and Mitchell’s 1978 Warhol homage Kidnapped, Men in Orbit is based on a single idea or situation. Two costumed astronauts (Mitchell and Lurie) are strapped into their seats in a space capsule that appears to be a classic Lower East tub-in-kit apartment and blast off into space, guided by the voice of their unseen Mission Control (Michael McClard). The movement of the capsule and subsequent absence of gravity is signified by occasional camera tilts. The only other special effect is a video monitor which at one point shows the men their wives back on earth (one them is the fellow Super 8 filmmaker and future screenwriter Becky Johnston).
Men in Space was actually Lurie’s second film. An earlier Super-8 film titled, if memory serves, Hell Is You [African Queen] recreated a scene from John Huston’s 1951 classic in Lurie’s bathtub, with the filmmaker in the Humphrey Bogart role and saxophonist James Chance playing a leech. Men in Orbit is in no way a parody. The movie not so much a satire on science fiction as a science fiction experiment — how will these actors perform under these specific conditions? The soundtrack is noisy with largely unintelligible dialogue but nothing much actually happens. (If anything, the movie, in production at roughly the same time as Ridley Scott’s Alien, conveys the banality of space travel, made during a period when NASA was part of daily consciousness: Skylab was falling, the space shuttle was about to begin regular flights.)
Mitchell and Lurie smoke innumerable cigarettes and devour what looks like a McDonald’s happy meal. Mitchell in particular is giggling throughout. These men may truly be in orbit but their often hysterical laughter suggests that the movie’s real drama may be pharmaceutical, played out in their own inner space.
Lurie appeared in and worked on numerous No Wave movies before attracting wider attention with his “fake jazz” ensemble the Lounge Lizards and starring appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 Stranger Than Paradise.
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J. Hoberman is the author of the books An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (2011), Film after Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? (2013), Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (2019), among others.
Preservation note 2012 by Alice Moscoso and Brent Phillips
While preserving videotapes from the Andrea Callard Papers, NYU Fales Library discovered Men in Orbit at the tail end of a 3/4″ U-matic videotape. Identified as a compilation reel for a weekly Manhattan public access TV program (Red Curtain, 1979-1983), it contained transfers of a Callard film as well as John Lurie’s piece. Originally shot in Super 8, Men in Orbit was thought to be lost. No film elements could be located, not even through the makers of the film. Thus, it has been rediscovered and the video preserved by the library on DigiBeta videotape, which was the source material for the Orphans in Space DVD.
Man in Orbit:
John Lurie interviewed by Andrea Callard
(also published in INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media)
When I sent 22 boxes of material to NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections, I knew I had kept things but I had no idea I had “saved” anything. I was surprised to learn that the original film of John Lurie’s Men in Orbit was lost — although it was not hard to imagine. It was not unusual for Super 8mm filmmakers to cut and edit their original footage, handling it many times, then screen the results using unpredictable projectors, without ever making prints or even video copies. It didn’t seem that important at the time. One just moved onto the next compelling idea.
Ours was the first generation to form and take in events as a global TV audience in the millions. Internationally popular bands modeled compelling and fun ways to work together while challenging the status quo. New Wave and New American films were in the theaters, especially in college towns. Over 100,000 people worked collaboratively on the space race between the USA and the USSR. This conjured hope, ambition, confidence, and adventure with the industrial collaboration supported by taxpayer enthusiasm. The war in Vietnam depleted and divided the country. During the 1970s, the large industrial cities of the U.S. slid into recession. Some 800,000 people moved away from New York during that decade. Some things were difficult and dangerous in the city, but there was a lot of cheap open space downtown. My many talented peers and I arrived downtown with a sense of freedom and fun — and with dogged work ethics too. Small groups of artists worked together and began a regeneration in the cultural fabric of the city.
During 1977-79, Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab) had a weekly public-access cable TV show, originating from Jim Chladek’s ETC Studios on 23rd Street (later renamed Metro-Access Inc.). The All Color News was the earliest iteration, then Potato Wolf. Both were live TV, or mixtures of live and pre-recorded material. Red Curtain followed (1979-83), as a way to show completed artist films and tapes.
The version of Men In Orbit on this DVD originated from a 3/4” U-matic videotape that went to the Fales Library in 2004 as part of my “papers.” The tape was marked only “June 4.” It included a transfer of my 1977 Super 8mm film 11 thru 12, as well as a collaborative piece organized by Jenny Holzer, and, as it turned out, Men In Orbit. It had been compiled on the videotape for a 1979 broadcast on Red Curtain. The titles match the character generator labeling on other tapes broadcast by Colab from ETC Studios, so I believe that they were added for that broadcast.
Men In Orbit was previously screened three times, April 11 thru 13, 1979, as part of a month of screenings at the New Cinema on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village.
At the time, I barely knew John Lurie but I remember how focused he was when he worked in my loft, where Colab’s 3/4” U-Matic video editing decks were housed. I knew Michael McClard better, a Men In Orbit collaborator and the voice of Mission Control in the film. We were both friends with the artist Robin Winters and we were all students at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s. James Nares was Men In Orbit’s cinematographer. I probably met him in the crowd around Barnabus Rex, a neighborhood bar on Duane Street, in TriBeCa. Over the Fourth of July weekend in 1975, James and a dozen other people came along on a three-day canoe trip I orchestrated down the Delaware River.
I have rewatched Men in Orbit twice recently and remembered that, about eight minutes in, astronauts Lurie and Eric Mitchell dropped LSD before “taking off.” Below are the things I wondered about in an e-mail conversation I had with John Lurie on October 20, 2011. Nesrin Wolf facilitated our communication.
Genesis
AC: At least four of the nine people listed in the credits were filmmakers at the time. How did the idea for Men in Orbit come about? How did the group decide to work together and what were the dynamics of the collaboration?
JL: The driving force behind all of this was Eric Mitchell, who basically demanded that everyone make a film. I doubt much would have happened without his unstoppable and sometimes annoying energy. He had an idea to open a theater using the films that we would all make.
AC: Was there a written treatment or script?
JL: There was dialogue written for the actors playing Mission Control. Everything with Eric and me in the capsule was improvised.
Sound
AC: How was the sound of the film planned or thought about? Was it shot in Super 8mm film with a separate sound system, Super 8mm sound film, or something else?
JL: I was pretty pleased with the sound. We had a pre-mixer that was fed directly into the camera. I probably put more thought into the sound than the camera. And what James Nares did was more than brilliant, achieving a weightless quality by floating the camera, constantly, above us. It was shot in Super 8.
AC: Men In Orbit begins with some expectant, exciting sound, chords probably, accompanying the astronauts as they move with a group of others through a corridor on the way to an adventure. Musician Arto Lindsay plays one of the pre-flight physical doctors. Did he make the introductory sound? How was the “outer space” ambient white noise made?
JL: The opening music is James Nares on drums and me on guitar. The white noise came from the broken TVs and radios that were pouring out static. We also over recorded the clip on mics.
AC: After the ironic and endearing “Song for Our Wives,” we see the wives on the TV monitors, then hear the wives talking with you and Erik from behind the camera. It brings them within the containing space of the apartment. The way you are all in your own world together for the moment feels sweet.
JL: That was Becky Johnston and Mary Lou Fogarty. They were really our girlfriends at the time and they were really within the containing space as they were standing three feet outside the capsule. But the sweetest thing of all that was my brother Evan, who was really my little brother at the time. He had just moved to New York and I called him at 3 a.m. to come over immediately to play the harmonica beeps in the background. He rushed over and patiently played his beeps.
Visuals
AC: James Nares’s visceral camera work is a strength of Men In Orbit. While framing you and Erik Mitchell as astronauts from a ladder, in a dance of sorts, he seems to become an unseen third astronaut.
JL: James Nares and Michael McClard, as Mission Control, saved that movie.
AC: How, or who, edited the film (or video)?
JL: I edited the film in Super 8. I hated doing it. I like editing but hated cutting up these tiny bits of film after trying to see it through this ridiculous viewfinder. It took months with glue stuck everywhere.
AC: How did the staging come about?
JL: I was collecting forever junk and filling my apartment with it. I don’t know why, really. There used to be a lot of great junk in New York. The film cured me of this, after I made the capsule and Mission Control in my apartment.
AC: You and Erik were strapped into your seats facing yourselves on two TV monitors and you also appear on two monitors behind your heads; lots of you two, but no pictures of space or the Earth around you, except as represented by Michael McClard’s voice of authority over the audio.
JL: Is there a question? The $500 budget prevented me from filming in space.
AC: The look of the film is stylish, expedient, DIY: orange crates, bathtub as desk, vacuum cleaner hoses, motorcycle helmets. Did anyone in particular determine how it would look?
JL: Yes, that was all me. But, again, I did not remotely envision what it would look like in the end. James’ work was extraordinary.
AC: The film starts out as a bold and charming spoof, then slows down awhile, regains some velocity then stops. But it doesn’t really stop. Was Men In Orbit an important part of how you launched yourself on a long creative journey that in time shifted to the Lounge Lizards, more acting and filmmaking, composing, painting, and other things? Do you see continuity between the buddy/road movie of Men In Orbit and the pairings/ journeys of your other films, and/or how you live and work now? What does it feel like to see it again now?
JL: It was great back then. It was all energy and ideas. There was no concern for money or credit. It was really pretty wonderful. Very soon after that everything changed for the worse.
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Andrea Callard is a New York-based artist. Her Super 8 films 11 thru 12 and Fluorescent/Azalea were preserved on 16mm by NYU MIAP students and Bill Brand’s BB Optics. The new prints premiered at the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium. In 2012, she incorporated them into a new feature-length work, Talking Landscape.
Artist John Lurie‘s work appears on his websites, strangeandbeautiful.com and johnlurieart.com. The Colab collective continues to document its work at collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com.