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By Megan Riesz
The Brooklyn Paper
A film festival dedicated to all things futuristic is going to look surprisingly antiquated this year.
An extreme antique collector who says he has amassed over 1,000 priceless inventions — such as a conch shell hearing aid, a World War II homing pigeon parachute, and something called “Dr. Scott’s Electric Flesh Brush” — will help kick off the second annual Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival at Williamsburg’s IndieScreen on Dec. 6 with a demonstration of his favorite sci-fi-related items.
“If you watch a sitcom, you’ll have stars of the show,” said Denny Daniel, who has purchased more than 1,500 artifacts on eBay this year alone. “My stars are not animals or humans. They’re actual things.”
A former photo retoucher and freelance filmmaker whose work has been displayed in the Chelsea Art Museum and other galleries across New York, Daniel began collecting antiques in the ’80s. He has since added thousands of pieces to his catalog — including one of the first models of Thomas Edison’s cylinder phonograph, and a quack weight-loss device called the “Relaxacisor,” which was banned by the FDA in 1970.
Daniel decided to take his collection on tour after putting on demonstrations for friends in his antique-littered Greenwich Village apartment, where he also holds meetings for fans of Steampunk — a science fiction sub-genre that combines Victorian-era aesthetics with modern technology. After a test-run at his old elementary school, the curiosity curator started touring his “Museum of Interesting Things” around to other schools in the city with the help of a five-person staff.
“I decided that I wasn’t happy about my career in my life,” said Daniel. “I felt as if I wasn’t doing something to change peoples’ lives.”
Daniel, a former literature major at New York University, thought it was only right that he bring his collection to the Philip K. Dick fest, considering his own appreciation for the late science fiction novelist, whose books inspired films such as “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall,” and “Minority Report,” amongst others.
“It’s almost like he’s a prophet,” said Jonathan Carsten, the festival’s public relations manager. “If you look at his novels, you see he wanted to talk about technology and the dangers of what comes with that. We have things like Google Glass — they could be dangerous at some point. You never know.”
The three-day festival will screen 35 films featuring original or adapted material inspired by Dick, as well as other sci-fi and existential authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Anton Wilson, and Franz Kafka. According to Carsten, highlights in this year’s line-up include “Son of Man,” a retelling of Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” set in Croatia during World War II, and “Territorial,” a horror film by Efren Ramirez — better known as Pedro from “Napoleon Dynamite.”
The Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Festival at IndieScreen [289 Kent Ave. between South First and South Second streets in Williamsburg, (347) 227–8030, www.indiescreen.com]. Dec. 6 at 7 pm. $18.
Reach reporter Megan Riesz at mriesz@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-4505. Follow her on Twitter @meganriesz.
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