Playing Favorites

by John Vettese

You can view public figures a couple of ways.They can be demagogues sent to fulfill some specialized calling that's out of the reach of mere mortals. Or they can be people just like the rest of us.

Most celebrities fall somewhere in between, but discovering their multidimensional aspects can be appealing — look how quickly that clip of Michael Nutter's impressive flow on "Rapper's Delight" racked up the YouTube hits last week. It showed the new mayor as not just some uber-intelligent cyborg who will curb our escalating murder rate and fix our public school system, but also a fun guy with a fondness for old-school rap.

To that end, Nutter and a half-dozen other Philly notables are presenting movies at National Mechanics this winter as part of a series organized by Philebrity and TLA Video. It's not the first free movie night in the city, but it has an edge over its brethren in that it brings out local bigshots to talk about the films and why they're their favorites.

Dan Yemin — who has started more hardcore punk bands than you'll probably ever listen to — hosts Stanley Kubrick's Cold War dark comedy Dr. Strangelove on Feb. 7. XPN's Jim McGuinn eschews his anglophile leanings to present the reggae-centric crime flick The Harder They Come on Feb. 21. Also on deck are WIP's Anthony Gargano and Espers' Greg Weeks, carrying the series through March.

This week, famed DJ King Britt brings The Wiz, Sidney Lumet's 1978 adaptation of William Brown's Broadway musical, where The Wizard of Oz is retold with an all-black cast. It's got a young Michael Jackson playing the Scarecrow and freaking owning "Ease on Down the Road," Diana Ross delivering Dorothy and Richard Pryor as the comically fumbling title character. Everybody dances and sings in a bright palette of disco pageantry where Oz looks like Harlem and trash-can monsters haunt subway stations. Britt told us over e-mail how he saw the stage version with his parents in the '70s and had a tough time getting into it, "but then Diana Ross and Michael Jackson ... and Quincy [Jones, who was the film's musical supervisor] ... it was on!" Britt particularly digs the Emerald City sequence ("The disco groove is ridiculous, and coming from Philly, it really hits home") and sees the movie as an overlooked classic.

The series continues next Thursday, Jan. 31, with Nutter hosting. His is one of the only installments where the film selection remains unannounced. "We've actually had a lot of people ask," says TLA's Shelly Ray. "It's cool that we can get people thinking about the mayor in a nonpolitical way."

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

The Wiz Thu., Jan. 24, 7:30 p.m., free, National Mechanics, 22 S. Third St., philebrity.com/tlascreeningseries