Binge-watching pioneer brings movie mania to Moorestown

In a Northeast Philadelphia apartment nearly 40 years ago, Irv Slifkin and his movie-mad pals pioneered an American pastime: binge watching.

"We had a continuous film festival," recalls Slifkin, 59, describing how a trunk-size, top-loading VCR, a console color TV, and a stack of newfangled videotapes kept people couch-bound for a long weekend.

These days, Slifkin lives in Delran, writes and lectures about movies - "I've seen thousands, too many to count" - and does screenings at Philadelphia-area venues such as the Moorestown Library.

He took over the library's "First Monday Films" series after the death last year of longtime Moorestonian John "Jack" Favorite, whose screenings were a local institution.

"Jack had been an actor on stage and screen and only showed classic 16mm films from his own collection," library director and self-described film buff Joe Galbraith says. "I wanted to keep the series going."

Veteran Philadelphia-area film reviewer Lou Gaul suggested Galbraith reach out to Slifkin.

"I've known Irv for years and respect him so much," says Gaul, a Moorestown resident who contributes movie reviews to the Burlington County Times.

"Irv is a scholar, an author, a celebrity interviewer . . . and when he talks, you can feel his affection for film," Gaul adds. "We're lucky to have him."

I catch up with Slifkin in the Moorestown Library's Meeting Room A, where he'll screen his next selection, The Man Who Would Be King, at 7 p.m. Monday.

The author of "Filmadelphia: A Celebration of a City's Movies" says he has "always loved the medium" of film.

Now 59 and a father of two, Slifkin grew up in Northeast Philly's Oxford Circle section. Watching The Alamo at the Castor Theater is his earliest cinematic memory.

"My grandmother would take me downtown on the El to the big movie houses like the Stanley and the Boyd. She loved musicals," he says.

"As a kid I was constantly going to the movies. I would study the movie ads in the Bulletin and at the library I took out books about movies."

Later, Slifkin began making a weekly Center City pilgrimage to buy Variety at the Broad and Locust newsstand, and got in hot water for saying that The Towering Inferno "sucked" during his review of the movie on Northeast High's radio station.

"At Temple, I mostly wrote features about movies for the Temple News," he says. "I wrote for the Bulletin and whoever would take my writing."

Slifkin's more than 30-year association with Philadelphia's video mail-order, rental, and retail giant Movies Unlimited helped cement his reputation, as well as his "Movie Irv" nickname.

"My job was putting together that big catalog they had," he says. "I wrote 90 percent of those little capsule [summaries]."

Slifkin's pithy way with words about cinema is evident in the plot summaries he provides for the First Monday Films series, which so far has included Sunset Boulevard, Tootsie, and Gabriel Over the White House, a little-seen political satire from 1932.

"What I like is showing people a movie they haven't seen," he says. "Or telling them things about a movie they may have seen but didn't know."

Thus on July 8 he will introduce a showing of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, in my view one of the most fabulously terrible movies of all time (he begs to differ) at PhilaMOCA.

Widely viewed as a commercial disaster, the torrid tale of curvaceous rock stars gone wild "was actually a huge [box office] success," notes Slifkin, who interviewed and became friendly with the legendary director, Russ Meyer.

But its mainstream studio, 20th Century Fox, seemed "almost embarrassed that it was a success," he adds.

Despite having helped popularize binge watching - at least, among certain Northeast Philly college kids in the late '70s - Slifkin still prefers to watch a film in a theater, with other people.

He insists that going to the movies offers the best venue for a film to "take over your life" for a couple of hours.

"It has to do with focus, and with the communal experience," Slifkin says.

"I don't think that can be duplicated, even with the best home theater system in the world."

kriordan@phillynews.com

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