Lights low, interest high

“HERE’S the best part. You gotta watch it,” says Spencer Lee, known better to some as the Bigfoot Lodge Movie Guy. “It makes no sense.”

The grainy black-and-white 16-millimeter film from the 1950s titled “Aqua Frolics” projects onto a 4-by-5-foot screen near the fireplace in the lodge-like bar on Los Feliz Boulevard.

Patrons go about their business as if it were any other bar, drinking, mingling and dancing, but they begin to pivot their heads toward the screen as their bodies still face their companions.

The scene is of a group of people underwater in a pool sitting down for dinner.

“I’ll bet you $100 that’s the first time you’ve seen people eat turkey underwater,” the movie guy says.

Some onlookers shake their heads in awe, most laugh at the scene, but whatever their reaction, they all experience the same problem: It’s hard not to stare.

“The idea of showing that kind of film in a bar, besides cracking me up, it really interests me,” says Lee, a 28-year-old UCLA graduate who studied, you guessed it, film.

Ever since becoming the proud owner of a closet full of educational films that his former grade school planned to toss out, Lee has had a passion for collecting old 16-millimeter, Super-8, and 8-millimeter films.

He owns films from the 1920s, strangers’ home movies and, of course, the recently screened footage of people eating turkey underwater.

Lee shows his prized possessions every Thursday and Sunday night from 10 p.m. until close at the Lodge as curious crowds look on.

Said a 24-year-old regular: “I’ve never seen the same one twice.”

Bigfoot Lodge, 3172 Los Feliz Blvd., L.A., (323) 662-9227