Arlington filmmaker Rob Parrish.

The Internet Archive is one of those websites for which the Internet seems to have been invented. A repository of some 87,000 concerts, 434,000 films, 770,000 recordings, and 2.6 million texts — all part of the public domain — it's a digital world unto itself. You can, and will, get lost in there. I poked around it for this article and landed on, among other places, Fritz Lang's Harakiri (1919) and a review I once wrote of Nada Surf's The Proximity Effect (2000). Before I knew it, a half hour had passed. I had to force myself to quit surfing and get to the business at hand: writing about local filmmaker Rob Parrish's Web series Next to Heaven.

For the weekly series, which begins its second season today, Parrish plunders the Internet Archive's moving images database, which contains films of every stripe: industrial, commercial, Hollywood, newsreel, and educational, to name a few. The 47-year-old Arlington resident doesn't dive in with a specific idea, though. "A big part of the project has always been a concept of the certain amount of random chance," he says. Usually, he types something random into the search engine — "love or death or even something like a car, something kind of abstract, and the archive will spit out a list of movies. Sometimes I'll just go based on the description, and I'll download six or eight of them."

Then Parrish will watch the films with a notepad in hand — as he did recently on a Thanksgiving road trip to New Jersey, his wife at the wheel — and see what inspires him. "By the end of Thanksgiving break I had 12 different scripts that were keyed off of different images in the archive's movies," he says. Some of the scripts were surprising, and none would have materialized from simply staring at a blank page. "That's your visual raw material," he says. "That's what you've got." (The archive is loaded with films from the 1940s to the early '70s, when the catalog dwindles due to the Copyright Term Extension Act.)

And here's what Parrish makes with what he's got: an educational video about Smokey the Bear becomes the tale of a 12-year-old boy who lashes out at his father by tripping on LSD; a spinning spacecraft hovers over Parrish's head while he contemplates the (fictional) end of his marriage, after her pet name for him "went from honey to dickhead"; and an industrial video for wear-resistant rubber turns into a story of marital infidelity and murderous revenge. The shorts are exactly as advertised: surreal, funny, and bizarre. They're also utterly original, and would hold their own on Adult Swim.

The juxtaposition of the archive films' choreographed, wholesome imagery with Parrish's unwholesome, anachronistic narratives makes for an entertaining several minutes. But he's also making a larger point about manipulation through media, which is all too common. "It's really kind of important to the whole project, the unreliability of officially sanctioned imagery," he says. "Authority figures put out media and they say, 'This is it.' That may be what it looks like on the surface, but that's not all there is. There's always something deeper and more complex than what's on the surface. That little old lady isn't always who she seems to be."

This season of Next to Heaven, like the first season in 2006-2007, will run weekly for the entire year, and the only difference this time around is Parrish's incorporation of live action. "Of the 52 [films], not all are gems," he says, but he finds it a valuable writing exercise to make one a week. "I've made short films before, and often the problem was, 'What am I going to make?'" he says. "If you sit and hold out for the masterpiece to come, it's not coming. You've just got to write."

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A trailer for season two:

And the first episode, in which TBD has a cameo (well, the exterior of our building, anyway):