Onscreen, a muscle car containing a criminal and his girlfriend jump a tow truck and careen over a school bus full of screaming teenagers. The thugs chasing them crash through the stalled RV next to the bus, which promptly explodes. The filmgoers, who have just been browsing the reception area buying things from local vendors and watching in a space usually reserved for weddings, erupt in applause. It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and Southside Preservation Hall is once again home to Weird Wednesdays.
Hosted by local freelance filmmaker and photographer Greg TeGantvoort, who goes by the nickname “The Movie Mutant,” Weird Wednesdays began as screenings of cult classics and has mutated into a film plus a full-on monthly arts and crafts market and gathering scene for the weirdest people west of the Metroplex. When TeGantvoort was working as marketing director for Downtown Cowtown at the Isis theater on the North Side, he said to then-owner Jeffrey Smith, “ ‘Hey, we’re open seven days a week with a lot of time with nothing programmed and just the bar open. How about you give me one Wednesday a month so I can program a movie that is just super-off-the-wall weirdo just to see who comes in, stuff you typically gotta drive out to Dallas to see, something people will never know what they’re gonna get?’ And he was like, ‘Sure, whatever.’ ”
That first Wednesday of December 2021, TeGantvoort started with one vendor and 1987’s little-known meta-horror Anguish and has only grown from there.
On picking movies, he explains, “It’s always a different theme, always a secret. Like, ‘Hey, doing an action movie,’ ‘doing a musical,’ so people kinda know what to expect, but I pick movies I feel will be a very unique audience experience, whether shocking or hilarious or just downright bad that everyone gets to laugh at. It’s guaranteed to get the best audience reaction.”
After leaving the Isis because he claims the owners felt the screenings did not recoup costs, TeGantvoort relocated to Southside Preservation Hall after being put in contact with hall director Matthew Williams by local artist Trista Morris. (The hall is, coincidentally, also the place TeGantvoort held his wedding reception 10 years ago.)
Now, Southside Preservation Hall fills up the first Wednesday of every month with up to 40 vendors selling everything from homemade candles and jewelry to horror-themed purses.
One happy vendor is independent author Chase Tipton, a Fort Worthian who cites Cormac McCarthy as a major influence.
“The crowds actually understand my writing,” he said of his postapocalyptic series Guerrilla Architects.
But he also sees it as more than just a place to sell. “It’s a platform to bring out everybody’s inner rebel in a place people can feel at home … [and] vendors buy from other vendors. There’s no feeling of competition here.”
Local attendee Amanda Hill was there for her first time and said, “I love it already. I’ve already spent so much money!”
She went on to say, “A group of people so diverse having a blast — it makes so much sense, and I’ll definitely be coming back.”
While the crowd wasn’t as full as it was for June’s Pride Month event, perhaps due to plenty of competing events on the eve of Independence Day (or the sweltering summer heat), people still filled up the theater for the screening. After teasing the audience with trailers for movies like the Carl Weathers vehicle Action Jackson, TeGantvoort revealed the night’s screening. Directed by John Stewart and starring Barri Murphy, Gregory Scott Cummins, and William Hubbard Knight, 1989’s Action U.S.A. is a movie that, in the first five minutes, has a man dangling by his legs from a helicopter, a car chase with an explosion, and full-frontal nudity. TeGantvoort described the flick as “made by stuntmen who thought they could do better without things like ‘dialogue’ or ‘story.’ ”
And when the over-the-top action and laughable dialogue began, the audience hooted and hollered and ate it up. Only a technical failure necessitating the restart of the movie near the end seemed to mar the audience’s enjoyment.
TeGantvoort hopes to create a permanent space to host events like Weird Wednesdays, “a movie theater that is Fort Worth’s own, not some huge conglomerate from out of town.”
He’s gone on to help found to begin the process. With the following that Weird Wednesdays has amassed, they may be off to a good start.
