There will be a conversation/Q&A after the screening with artist Shepard Fairey and author Jonathan Lethem.  Fairey's latest book, Obey, The Art of Shepard Fairey is a compendium of Obey’s art from its beginnings to the more sophisticated works of recent years.  Shepard’s entry into popular culture came via his Andre the Giant Has a Posse sticker campaign which, along with his Obey style (a nod to They Live), which was birthed not long after Carpenter's film was released.  Fairey's Barack Obama Hope poster is perhaps the most famous work of this groundbreaking modern artist.

     Jonathan Lethem's latest work of fiction, Brooklyn Crime Novel has been called "one of the best novels about Brooklyn ever written” by NPR and sits nicely with last year’s Everyman's Library reissue of Motherless Brooklyn coupled with Fortress of Solitude, two of his most beloved works.  Lethem has written tirelessly about music, art, film, and culture.  In his recently issued Cellophane Bricks, he shares and reflects on art that he has collected, often times in trade, by some of the most important artists of the past fifty years. His current show at Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, "Jonathan Lethem's Parallel Play: Contemporary Art and Art Writing” features a collection of art, including works from Lethem's personal collection, and explores the relationship between art and writing.

     This very special screening brings together two legendary creative forces to celebrate a film that inspired them both.  In 2010, Lethem wrote They Live: A Novel Approach to Cinema and the movie helped shape Fairey’s unique blend of art and activism.  The conversation between these two is sure to stretch, as the film does, from low to high art - where the power of iconography and script, class and politics, science fiction and reality, all clash on the silver screen and into our lives.  They live, but so do we.