Profile: Found Footage Festival
As technological standards move along, a pile of discarded videotapes has been created — and people like Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher are wading through the mounds to retrieve otherwise lost gold from oblivion.
Pickett and Prueher are the curators behind the Found Footage Festival, a collection of oddball video clips that could feature anything from animated automatic-bidet instructions to the world’s most inept video service advertisement and far beyond either of those.
One of the ingredients that makes the festival so successful is its reality as a communal extension of the friendship between the hosts — Pickett and Prueher have known each other since sixth grade, and the festival was born from their natural routine of showing odd videos to friends in their parents’ living room.
The video collection began while Prueher was a McDonald’s employee during his sophomore year of high school and he indulged in a little industrial larceny after discovering a custodial trainee video in the break room.
“It was probably one of the most dumb, insulting things I had ever seen,” Prueher said during an interview this week. “It was this really poorly acted, poorly produced video with an overly perky trainee on his first day on the job — and this annoyingly perky crew trainer — and they tacked on a plot to it. It was so ridiculously dumb that I thought the world had to see this. So I took it home in my backpack that night and showed it to Joe.”
The two friends became obsessed with the video and began showing it to friends. Eventually, they developed whole routines around it. They also began combing thrift stores for discarded video tapes.
“That sparked the idea,” Prueher said. “If there are videos this ridiculous right under our noses, imagine what else is out there just waiting to be discovered.”
Their collection grew to mammoth proportions through these efforts, but also through some professional opportunities. Pickett worked for a video duplication company, and whenever something that fell into their definition of amazing passed through, he would make an extra copy of it.
Meanwhile, Prueher landed a job as head researcher for David Letterman. His job involved researching old commercials, high school plays and bad movies that guests had been featured in — this was an inroad to further video goofiness.
After years of private showings to friends, somebody suggested they take their collection out of their living room and make a live show out of it.
“We didn’t think anyone outside of our immediate circle of friends would really find this stuff funny, but we tried it,” Prueher said. “To our surprise, it was a big hit. We started getting offers to bring the show elsewhere, and five years later we’re still doing it.”
Over that time, the team has been able to hone their presentation, which consists of introducing the videos, giving some background and screening them. Some wisecracks might be inserted, but never so many as to be intrusive to the actual footage. Pickett and Prueher aren’t the center of the show, their collection is — they are happy to function as the guides to the real stars.
And there have been some stars to emerge from the festival — that is, within the self-created little bubble universe that Pickett and Prueher have created. One such luminary is Harvey Sid Fisher, a singer who recorded his own video special of zodiac-inspired songs, complete with ladies doing interpretive dances while he performs. Pickett and Prueher actually got to meet Fisher and have him appear at a festival.
“Every time we’re in Los Angeles, we go play a round of golf with him,” Prueher said. “We’re buddies with Harvey Sid Fisher.”
One of the team’s most popular finds has been footage of Jack Rebney, who they bill as “the world’s angriest RV salesman.” Pickett and Prueher have outtake footage of an informational Winnebago video Rebney was filming. Frustrated by mishaps in the process, he unleashes his fury on the crew and himself.
“It’s just one expletive after another — it’s a man losing his mind on camera, basically,” Prueher said.
Rebney really captured the imagination of the festival’s audience, which included a friend of his, during one show in Las Vegas. When Rebney found out Pickett and Prueher were showing the footage, he was livid — no surprise — but the team managed somehow to convince him to come to a screening and see how much people loved the footage.
“Sure enough, we show the video at the end of the show and look at the back of the room, and Jack’s got his arms folded and he looks pretty angry,” Prueher said. “And then, as the video gets people laughing — some to the point of tears — a little smile comes over his face. He was like the Grinch — we felt like his heart grew 10 times its size. He came down to the front of the house, and there was a standing ovation.”
Rebney regaled the audience with stories and was mobbed for photos and autographs — and another found-footage superstar was born.
Other festival highlights include the three-ring circus of amateur talent that was the Brooklyn public access show “Stairway to Stardom,” hosted by Frank Massey and his wife, Tillie. Pickett and Prueher tracked down a child disco-tap dancer who happily recreated her work for the festival audience — as well as Mark Fox, a.k.a. Little Marky, a singing televangelist who performs in a squeaky child’s voice.
Prueher and Pickett also use editing to great advantage. With Rebney, they edited together two cycles of rage — one with obscenities and another with nonsensical blubberings that often had a pseudo-Asian language feel to them. The team takes instructional videos, such as Pretty Boy Floyd’s guide to pool hustling or a tape that reveals how to seduce women through hypnosis, and strips them down to their bare essence.
That’s the challenge for the pair — producing the festival is a lot more work than just showing some horrible videos and having a chuckle. Sometimes they have to create the source of laughter through real evaluation of the most innocuous productions.
“We have something called ‘The Best of Harassment, where we took sexual harassment videos from various corporations, Prueher said. “We found 17 of them, and we cut together just the reenactments of what you’re not supposed to do, so it’s just one moment of harassment right after the other. For us, that was the funny part, these ridiculous reenactments. You’re turning crap into gold — you’re like an alchemist with this stuff that nobody else deemed worthy of saving.”
There’s a wealth of material for the festival, thanks to several factors. One is that, in the 1980s, the availability of cheap video production caused a boom that had never before been witnessed.
“If you bought a beard trimmer in 1989, it came with a how-to video on how to use it,” Prueher said. “It was sort of like vinyl in the ‘60s and the ‘70s — it was so cheap to press your own album that high school marching bands could record their own album. It’s really the same for VHS in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. It was so cheap and so accessible that you got all these people making videos who had no business making them — thankfully for us.”
The widespread format change to DVD meant that tons of unwanted tapes were being dumped, just waiting to be scooped up by the likes of Prueher and Pickett. In 2009, with digital file formats taking over from disks, the team is now finding the same gold in DVD format.
“One thing we found is that the formats may change, the production values may change, but bad ideas never really do,” Prueher said. “As long as there are people with a lot of ambitious ideas and very little talent that have access to video equipment, we’ll have a show for a long time.”
He thinks the appeal of the videos has not only been fun, but also revealed a larger truth that audiences latch onto. Even more so than reality television, the sorts of videos the Found Footage Festival features are raw, slightly voyeuristic, and can function as a mirror to society that many can identify with. It’s not so much making fun of other people as celebrating our own absurdities — anyone is capable of making the sort of ineptly honest video that pops up in the festival.
“I think these moments that were captured on videotape — maybe some of them are regrettable, but we think they say just as much about us as a culture as AFI’s Top 100 greatest films of all time,” Prueher said. “Those are easy to preserve and hang onto. I think these raw moments, regrettable moments, say a lot more about who we really are, our foibles and our obsession with videotape.”
The Found Footage Festival is about to embark on its biggest tour yet — 60 cities, including many in England — and is also developing a television version with the BBC. Prueher and Pickett have also developed a documentary film about the filthiest country music singer in America and the underground world of dirty music — inspired by a cassette tape they found at a truck stop.
Whatever the future holds for the team, they continue to watch all these videos so we don’t have to.
“It’s a needle in a haystack to find something that’s bad in just the right way,” Prueher said. “We lock ourselves in a room and watch as many videos as we can get through — hold hands and pray and try to get through them. It’s like a ‘Heart of Darkness’ thing after awhile.”
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