“It Came From Kuchar” 2009
EDIT: George Kuchar, 1942-2011
I know two pairs of filmmaking twins, so when I came across It Came From Kuchar (“quirky, inspiring”) in my Netflix search results, I was curious.
The 2009 documentary is an affectionate tribute to twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar, 60s underground film legends, whose home-made 8mm horror/melodramas are reminiscent of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (the worst film ever made). Yet, John Waters, Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin all appear in this doc to sing the Kuchars’ praises and cite them as influences.
The brothers grew up in the Bronx in the 40s and 50s, watching the golden age of Hollywood pass by. Around the age of twelve, they got their hands on an 8mm camera, and began to make movies that echoed and exaggerated the imagery they saw on the silver screen. By the early 60s, they were exhibiting their frothy, cartoonish pictures alongside Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol.
Unlike some of their contemporaries however, their legend has stayed underground. George Kuchar now teaches video production at a California college using consumer one-chip cameras, and Mike is making art films for the festival circuit. Kroot met the Kuchars through her participation in one of George’s workshops and decided to make a film about him, partly to provide them with some of the recognition they deserve. Her film is simple and uncontroversial, and does not overly glamourize the brothers. In their amusing Bronx accents, they discuss the influence of their game and indulgent mother, who appeared in their films until her death; they explain the trademark exaggerated eyebrows they draw on their actresses, and they talk about the exhilaration and horror of the sexual revolution and the 80s HIV outbreak. Kroot sorts these stories into a comprehensive primer on the Kuchars’ oeuvre, and punctuates them with the celebrity interviews, which demonstrate just how much of an impact they made on their underground contemporaries.
The opening scenes of It Came From Kuchar show George directing his bewildered students through scenes of Halloween costume horror mayhem. It looks more like a community theater acid trip than a legend at work.
In fact, it’s how the Kuchars have always worked. Accessible materials, unpretentious talent, and an unrestrained sense of play are what allowed them to keep working through their formative years. It allowed them to go at it until they had developed a style and refined their methods. Now they have a body of over 200 films between them: thoughtful, sincere films, expressed in the exaggerated, spectacular language of Hollywood, which shine light upon the absurdities and obsessions of American cinema.
Today’s new filmmakers have received a clear message from the bodies that govern the industry: You’re on your own. Nobody is guaranteed funding, distribution, or support outside what they can scrape together themselves. The Kuchar brothers are an example of what can come of such a situation. As long as you honour your own ideas by bringing them to fruition, even if your monsters are made of tinfoil, the set caterer is your mom, and the lead actress is also your mom, you might still end up a legend.
Written for PullFocusFilms.com, the blog of Pull Focus, Vancouver’s non profit film school.
On biography
I interviewed Nana today. She will be 91 in a few months and still lives free of caregivers, canes, and reading glasses. They only took away her driver’s license a couple of years ago, but that’s because she couldn’t hear the driving tester’s instructions, but if you ask her, she will tell you she isn’t deaf. By her account she has no loss of volume; she can hear a pin drop “as long as it’s a good sized pin”, it’s just that she has to read your lips to understand what you’re saying. I’m not going to argue, though I think if she’s 90 and still on the go she could admit to that small infirmity without losing face.
Nana
I went with just the one 8g SD card which lasts about an hour on dad’s Panasonic FZ7, and we did well to stay on-task and discuss the questions I had written down, but projects like this are a reminder of the complete inadequacy of biography. Just like my ten hour walking video was completely inadequate to describe my ten hour no-talking walk, I will be lucky if I can make anything of these interviews that merely echoes the gravity of all the lives and experiences associated with this place. You just can’t shoot everything, nor explain the meaning of everything you shot, even though it all has meaning. Why did I waste card space on watching Nana down the dregs of her cold tea? Because it means something to me. If it’s not your grandmother, will you feel anything?
Nostalgia Overload
Did the first interview for the Shawmere doc today. Interviewing is hard. Especially when it’s your family, or someone who’s as good as family. I procrastinated this week and finally Keith told me to do the first one on him as practice. It was a confidence boost.
The problem now is that when I dump the AVCHD files directly into Final Cut Pro, they expand to a million times their card size and you have to start digging out your hard drive to make room. Foolishly, I only brought 20g free on my hard drive, and had to commandeer one of dad’s old vintage 120g USB 2.0 drives. I’ll have to limit the interviews for now, or I won’t be able to get the footage home. This will require more planning. Maybe piles and piles of SD cards.
I’m also asking myself what’s so special about this place and these people that it deserves the scrutiny of a documentary? So far I feel like this thing will be of the old-school nostalgic Canadian slice-of-life variety; not particularly edgy or thought-provoking. It should have been an episode of On The Road Again. I’ll fill up some more hard drives and see how I feel.
Let’s all go to the lobby
I watched a good portion of the hearings today in which BP CEO Tony Hayward took it from the congressional committee over his company’s screwups. Hayward was full of false contrition and scripted answers, and most of congress sounded like they were in acting class for all the fake anger. The oil-smeared protester in the audience at least seemed genuinely emotional rather than smugly self-righteous. I can’t help wondering if A) non-televised congressional hearings are like this and B) if this was the modern day equivalent of putting Hayward in stocks letting people throw rotten vegetables at him.
The purpose of televising a hearing is to demonstrate to the public that justice is being carried out. If the hearing had not been televised, people would have cried out at the lack of transparency in the investigation. If the hearing had been televised, but congress’s questions civil and direct, the public would have cried out that congress wasn’t angry enough and therefore must not appreciate the magnitude of the disaster. Result: made-for-TV outrage and long rehearsed rants with lots of synonyms for ‘outraged’. What was really accomplished that was more valuable than if everyone in that room had put on boots and lathered up some pelicans?
hardly working
Second shift at the video store today, and I like it. No, I love it. I’m sure there will be dick customers and days that are so boring my bones hurt, but it just feels really right. Very generalist. I am surrounded by sources of inspiration. The people are nice and I feel like there is plenty of room for me to be eccentric here. It will also pay the rent, but I will have to get some other work too if I want to drink or eat or ride the bus or do anything else.
Also tomorrow I have to pack for my trip home to Ontario. I have committed to shooting enough footage there to put something together having to do with the Shawmere documentary. God knows what it will be. I’m suddenly very nervous about my skills as an interviewer. I hate the camera when it makes people self-conscious. How is that overcome? Nobody wants to hear people talking about subjects they are comfortable with; people want to see people talking about provocative, emotional, life-altering things. A smart person would treat an interview like their Facebook page–don’t say anything you wouldn’t want your worst enemies to hear.
I hate when people say “Oh, remember me when you’re famous” as though going to film school makes you a filmmaker and being a filmmaker means you’ll famous. I hope the people I interview, some of whom have known me since I was shoveling beach sand into my diapers, won’t overestimate this project and censor themselves too much. It will be small, especially if they are boring.
Worthwhile
Somebody named Jaron Pitts took a Serbian sci-fi animation and used footage from current films to make a live action trailer for it. Now Warner Bros. is coughing up cash for the rights.
Technotise: What the hell is it and why is Hollywood spending millions to remake it? [io9]
This is some crazy validation for all the people I know who like to play with footage to create new stories, and a surprising way to get money moving.
The freedom to Facebook
The requirement to have a website for several new film festival submissions, as well as the anxious freedom of being unemployed, have inspired me to start a blog/website. We’ll start with the free one and wait for the owner of www.nancyshaw.com to stop throwing her money away.
nancyshaw.wordpress.com 