Cook: 500 Films With The Manny Perry Movie Club

This past week, a group of Little Rock film buffs together passed an impressive movie-going milestone. For the past ten years, the Manny Perry Movie Club has met every Sunday to see a film at one of Little Rock’s movie theaters and, as of last week, they’ve seen a total of 500 movies together.

I’ve been a member of this nine-person club since its creation in late 2003. For a group of folks to see a total of 500 films every Sunday at a local movie theater is an amazing accomplishment and I felt compelled to write a story about our club.

The club members are a diverse group of folks who hold a variety of occupations. The group includes a novelist, a social worker, a couple of college professors, an office manager, and we come from all walks of life. Thankfully, I’m the only one involved in politics so we generally avoid political discussions over our weekly dinners after the film. I also serve as a weekly film critic for KLRT-FOX 16.

We’ve had members come and go over the years, some leaving the group due to family obligations, moving away, or in the case of two founding members, moving to Tuscany to open a B&B.

The club is named after Manny Perry, a Hollywood stuntman.  How the club came to be named after Perry will be explained in a moment.

On a rotating basis, every Sunday one member picks the movie the club will view that day between 4:00-5:00pm and then also chooses where the club goes to eat dinner afterward to discuss the film. An ironclad requirement on which film is chosen is that it must be rated as “Fresh” on RottenTomatoes.com. This rule weeds out many sub-par (read Adam Sandler’s movies) films. The website collects critics’ reviews from across the country, creating a rating system. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/

We’ve learned over the years there are often films that critics rave about but are boring as hell to average movie-goers. “Schultze Gets the Blues” and “Tchoupitoulas” are two classic examples of horrible films the critics loved, but should be avoided at all costs.

The films we see tend to skew toward the independent, foreign film or documentary variety, but we do see our fair share of Hollywood blockbusters.

I interviewed fellow movie club member Kevin Brockmeier about the Manny Perry Movie Club. Kevin also happens to be an Arkansas-based writer of some renown.

How and when did this club get its start?

Informally we began meeting in November of 2003, when a cluster of us who were near-strangers began chatting after a showing of American Splendor at Market Street and decided to get dinner together so that we could continue talking about the movie. We realized that we enjoyed each other’s company, and one of us, Rusty [Wyrick], took it upon himself to call everyone the next week, and then again the next, to do it again. We formalized the group at the very beginning of 2004.

Why was the movie club named after stuntman Manny Perry?

At the time, Manny Perry was featured in an anti-piracy ad that ran before nearly every movie we saw. (Little-known fact: He used to be the body double for Lou Ferrigno on TV’s The Incredible Hulk.) Because he seemed to be an unofficial extra member of the group, there with us every single week, and because we all liked him, we christened the group in his name.

After ten years and 500 movies/dinners, what has kept this group together?

More than anything else, we take pleasure in spending time with each other. As you know, we’ve seen some great movies (The Lives of Others), some contentious ones (Zero Dark Thirty), and some awful ones (What the #$*! Do We Know?), and our roster has swelled and diminished, but we’ve become close friends over the past decade, and our Sunday night ritual has always been one of the highlights of the week — at least for me it has, and I suspect for everyone else, too.

What is your favorite memory/experience of the club?

There are so many, but the first memory that comes to mind is when we saw “Ghost Town” at Breckenridge back in 2008. The theater was completely silent until the scene where Ricky Gervais can’t stop his gag reflex over the combined smell of dog dander and air freshener. This struck one of us, Pepper, as funny, and he began cackling, so loudly and uncontrollably that pretty soon everyone else in the audience was laughing, too — laughing at the fact that they were with someone who couldn’t stop laughing. It was a perfect communal moment that had nothing to do with the movie itself and everything to do with the strange experience of sitting in a darkened room with a mysterious assortment of other human beings.

I asked our club’s namesake, Manny Perry, a few questions via email for this story. He’s always been kind and supportive every time we’ve contacted him. One year, Perry even called-in to our annual Holiday Party and spoke to the group for a few minutes.

I asked Manny what he thought about a group of people he’s never met deciding to name their movie club after him:

“I was shocked and amazed that something like this would come out of the trailer I did in the theaters. At first I thought it was a joke, then the club had T-shirts & pens made up so it was amazing for me,” he said.

It is true, we’ve had pens made that we hand out and even have t-shirts.

Manny Perry has had an impressive movie career. When you read his film credits on IMDB it seems like he’s been involved in almost every major blockbuster for the past thirty years.

I asked Manny what was his proudest moment in the entertainment industry:

“My proudest moment was when I first saw myself on the big screen in the ‘Kentucky Fried Movie’ and a very close second is when you guys started the Manny Perry Fan Club. Still amazed about that to this day,” Manny said.

Our club is proud to have Manny Perry as our namesake.

Getting together on Sundays with the Manny Perry Movie Club is my favorite part of the week. Our discussions are always lively and it’s often the most fun when we disagree on a film. For example, after all this time the club is still split down the middle over “Napoleon Dynamite.”  I still recall that debate ten years later.

But at the end of every meal, we always raise a glass to toast the person who picked the day’s film and any friendly disagreements over the film are quickly forgotten.

I love movies and I love this group of folks. Hopefully, we’ll see another 500 films together.