If Michael Flores, grand pooh-bah of the Psychotronic Film Society, pope of the Church of the SubGenius, and steady combatant of the forces of evil in the form of the liberal police state, good taste, and the Film Center, had a dream of all dreams, it might involve a voice in the sky asking him if he would be interested in programming a film series in an intimate downtown theater that practically nobody even knew existed.
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The Civic Studio Theater itself is a strange remnant of World War II. In the 40s, says Matthew Hickey, the opera house concessions manager who proposed the revivification of the theater and called in Flores, the military took over large chunks of Chicago office space: in 1942 they installed a small, 180-seat theater in the opera house to use for screening training and propaganda films. After the war it fell into disuse and “sat dark until the mid-80s,” says Hickey. The opera house renovated the space around that time, and even put a couple of small theatrical presentations into it. But it shut down again, and is now used primarily by a church group for midday prayer meetings.
The plan for the theater, say both Flores and Hickey, is to take its programming somewhere beyond the usual Film Center or Music Box art films, showing movies ranging from the more obscure works of well-known directors to those that fit into that field of filmmaking known as the psychotronic.
The theater will keep Flores busier than usual, and besides programming it he’s going to be spending a lot of time preparing for hosting the September 1992 worldwide convention of the Church of the SubGenius, a group of popular- culture enthusiasts who worship “Slack” (basically a synonym of “fun”) and the “living avatar” of it, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, a pipe-smoking line drawing that looks like a clip from a 1940s pipe advertisement. The last SubGenius convention was ten years ago, when the church had 1,200 adherents. This convention will be the first since the publication of The Book of the SubGenius, which Flores helped write and is now in its third printing. “The current mailing list has nearly 8,000 names,” says Flores. “It could be pretty amazing.”
