What would ultimately become known as The Movie Orgy was conceived by Dante in early 1966, during his second year at the Philadelphia College of Art. The primary inspiration for its creation came from the then popular revival screenings of the 1943 serial Batman, which had begun in July of 1965 at the Playboy Theater in Chica go… On 9 October, however, the theater decided to try a different format, unspooling the entire 15chapter serial in a single screening. An Evening with Batman and Robin, as it was billed, was an immediate hit… Inspired directly by Batman, and influenced by Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay Notes on “Camp”, he decided to stage a “Camp Movie Night.” Securing a rental print of another vintage chapter play, The Phantom Creeps (1939), Dante proceeded to put on a seven-hour show by interspersing reels of the 12episode serial with whatever bits struck his fan cy: pieces of features, old TV shows and commercials, industrial films, cartoons, etc. In this nascent form, The Movie Orgy was a smashing success. For its first year or so, the show was limited to occasional restagings on the Philadelphia campus. Its content changed with each running, as Dante gained access to additional films and generally experimented with the format; it soon developed into a two-projector performance, usually put on by Dante and his friend Jon Davison. The main feature would be threaded up on the first projector, and “when the boring part started,” the other projector, with the “alternate” film pieces, would take over.
The Movie Orgy hit the big time early in 1970 with a screening at New York’s legendary rock concert venue, the Fillmore East, an account of which appeared in the 21 March 1970 issue of “The New Yorker”.
This somewhat  unanticipated   bit of nationwide publicity for what had, until then, been essentially an “underground” event, “made us paranoid,” says Dante, because “we didn’t own the rights to any of these films!”

Howard Prouty, in Joe Dante, a cura di Nil Baskar, Gabe Klinger, Österreichisches Filmmuseum/ Synema, Wien 2014