A Night at EZTV
Saturday, March 29th 2025
Doors open 7pm, show begins 7:30
$15 General Admission / $12 VPES Members
☆☆☆ Watch the TRAILER here ☆☆☆
Featuring in person: writer/comedian Beth Lapides, performance artist/actor John Fleck, and EZTV Founding Member and Director Michael J. Masucci!
In this one-night-only event, join us as we transport you to a hypothetical evening at West Hollywood’s EZTV Video Gallery. Structured as two distinct blocks, this program features a mix of rarities and oddities both from EZTV and its sibling organization—the Washington, DC-based Video Free Earth—commemorating the community-oriented and, by and large radically queer video produced autonomously by both organizations at the height of the Reagan era.
The EZTV block features selections from its in-house videomagazine EZTV Eye; the re-premiere of Vertical Blanking’s collaboration with Beth Lapides, Deep Thought (1990); and an assortment of long-unscreened videos (including Conan The Waitress, Musta Been The Mustache, and Do It Yourself For Poets) that show the range of the West Hollywood scene’s campy, transgressive, strange, inspiring, and beautiful DIY creativity.
On the other coast, videomakers (and federal workers) Jamie Walters and Leonard Braverman collaborated with poets, performers, and activists like Chasen Gaver, Jack Guidone, and Isabel-Lee Malone on a series of wickedly satirical and thought-provoking videos like A Kennedy Trilogy (imagining a future in which Ted Kennedy was elected President) and Louise Nevelson Takes a Bath (featuring the post-modernist sculptress as a “droll transvestite”).
Opened in 1983, the EZTV Video Gallery was a production studio and one of the world’s first video microcinemas. Home to some of LA’s most adventurous programming, a typical night at the theater might include a mix of video art, low-budget horror, political documentaries, queer video, and performance art of every kind. In this program, you’ll see a little bit of all of the above, plus long-unseen interstitials from the EZTV archives for what is sure to be a night at the movies unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before—unless you were there, which you probably weren’t.
Archival EZTV Advertisments from LA Weekly
This event is part of Video Capital of the World: 45 Years of EZTVin L.A. an expansive week-long screening and performance series programmed by Elizabeth Purchell and Hollywood Entertainment.
The series honors both the diverse range of artists, videomakers, and communities that have found a home at Los Angeles’s EZTV over the course of its first 45 years of existence and the global influence that it has had on the development of video, digital, and performance art. Featuring a wide range of unique events at REDCAT, Brain Dead Studios, Whammy! Analog Media, 18th Street Arts Center, the Velaslavasay Panorama, Los Angeles Filmforum, and online, Video Capital of the World: 45 Years of EZTV in L.A. is a first-of-its-kind tribute to a still under-understood L.A. institution.
3/24 REDCAT - The Video Depositions of Vertical Blanking (+ Live Performance)
3/25 Brain Dead Studios - Blonde Death and Other American Perversions
3/26 Whammy! Analog Media - EZTV Comedy Spectacular featuring The Subversive Comedies of Sebastian
3/27 18th Street Arts Center - KATE JOHNSON (1969-2020) Artist/Hyphenate: An Evening of Screenings, and Live Performance
3/28 Whammy! Analog Media - SudZall Does It All! (45th Anniversary)
3/28 Whammy! Analog Media - Lesbian Erotic Video
3/29 Velaslavasay Panorama - A Night at EZTV
3/30 Whammy! Analog Media - The Big Scream Blues
3/31 LA Filmforum / 2220 Arts + Archives - Avant Video
