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Everyone likes a montage, right? Well, if you’re going to schedule an event around a sizzle reel, you might as well make it a good one. Tonight, Marc Lapadula, a script doctor who also teaches at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, rolls out a set of clips from 10 venerable pieces of American cinema. Lapadula’s program begins with the sound-barrier-breaking The Jazz Singer and I Am a Fugutive From a Chain Gang, one of the last gritty crime films Hollywood released before it adopted the sanitizing precepts of the Hays Code. But the program focuses mostly on the shattering of that code, with many of the same titles that Peter Biskind fixated on in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Expect blood-drenched clips from The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde, the sexual liberation of The Graduate (shown), and the emergence of the blockbuster in Jaws. Yes, it’s just a bunch of clips tacked on to Lapadula’s analysis, but it’s also an excellent primer for your Netflix queue.
The lecture begins at 7 p.m. at West End Cinema, 2301 M St. NW. $35. westendcinema.com. (202) 419-FILM.