With a pizza giveaway and DVD promotion Thursday — enjoyed by a steady stream of students in Houston Hall — the Social Planning and Events Committee’s Film Society hoped to plant seeds for big goals this semester.
Their first event of 2011, where they gave away free promotional materials for HBO show Funny or Die, was “just to get the mood going,” SPEC Film member and College junior Angela Feria said.
The promotional group that co-sponsored Thursday’s event is just one of a growing palate of industry contacts with which the committee is building a stronger relationship, according to SPEC Film co-director and College junior Kambiri Cox.
“There’s more awareness of SPEC Film [in the industry],” she said, adding that over the past semester they have made “a bunch of new industry contacts.”
Her committee hopes to translate these contacts into more free movie screenings for Penn students than in the past. Last semester, SPEC Film offered about two to five screenings a week, Cox said. These included advanced screenings of a handful of movies, including hit romantic comedy Love and Other Drugs, at nearby Rave Motion Pictures.
“We want students to think, ‘I want to see a movie. What is SPEC screening?’” Cox added. “We want to be on that level.”
The advanced screenings, however, are “routine” for the committee. According to SPEC Film co-director Blair Canner, an Engineering sophomore, the group is “aiming to do something really different” for the Academy Awards in late February.
Plans tentatively include screenings of nominees and past winners for Best Motion Picture supplemented by movie trivia questions, she said.
She hopes events such as these will help bring students into the movie culture.
“Let’s face it — Penn is not a huge film school,” she said. “[Our events] are so different from everything else you do at Penn.”
Finally, the committee plans to host a speaker from the film industry — “someone as big or even bigger than Joseph Gordon-Levitt,” Cox said, referring to their fall 2010 speaker. Speakers have been a hallmark of the committee since 2008, when they brought Spike Lee to campus.
Students can watch for the speaker event sometime in late February or March, she said. “Sometime before Fling — students don’t quite recover.”
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