Cast

Bob Fleischner, Jerry Sims

Film description

Shot in black and white in Smith’s Lower East Side apartment (the location for the movie that, as edited by Ken Jacobs, would become Blonde Cobra), Overstimulated featured Bob Fleischner and Jerry Sims – a sometime Smith model, also prominent in Ken Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death – wearing long, filmy dresses and jumping up and down in front of a flickering TV set. The camera work is scarcely less frantic; made after Scotch Tape, Smith’s second film likely dates from late 1959, before Smith and Fleischner had their falling out. In the aftermath of Flaming Creatures’ success, Jonas Mekas paid the cost of printing Overstimulated, which may have been (briefly) distributed by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative before Smith withdrew it, along with Flaming Creatures, two years later. Two years after that Overstimulated was incorporated in the program Horror and Fantasy at Midnight, which subsequently evolved into No President.

J. Hoberman / Live Film! Jack Smith!