This Saturday at Alamo Drafthouse, Houston is in for a treat. A strange, voyeuristic, 80's tinged video treat. Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher are the founders of the Found Footage Festival. Their credits include The Onion, Colbert Report and the Late Show with David Letterman. The Festival itself is a hilarious, sometimes awful look at the underbelly of corporate videos, instructional films and home movies collected at garage sales, thrift shops and other odd nooks around North America. Houstonist found Joe and Nick recently to find out more about the Found Footage Festival.
What first drove both of you to collect such an odd collection of video and how many found videos do you now have in the collection?
JOE PICKETT: Nick and I have known each other since 6th grade and we've always shared an appreciation for awful things. I think the first thing we officially bonded over was how much we loved/hated the '80s sitcom "Small Wonder." From there, our love for badness grew. We began our collection in high school with a training video Nick stole from the McDonald's he worked at. It was called "Inside and Outside Custodial Duties" and it was fascinatingly bad. McDonald's is a billion dollar company and we were amazed that they released this low-quality, mind-numbing training video. We were hooked. After college, I got a job at a video duplication house and whenever a good (read: bad) video came through, I'd make a copy for myself. The library really took off from there.
We've never actually counted the videos in our collection, but we have boxes and boxes in our office alone. We recently had to rent a storage locker. It was getting out of control. The more we tour this show, the more thrift stores and garage sales we hit. It's amazing how many stupid videos there are in the world. I feel like we've barely touched the surface.
How do you decide which videos make the cut and are included in the show?
JOE: Most videos we come across are painfully boring. It's really a needle in a haystack to find a good one. Our main criterion is that it's unintentionally funny. It takes a lot of patience to wade through all this crap, but when we find a gem, it makes it all worth it.
In looking at the trailers for the festival, one quickly concludes that there is a very large number of odd people who gained access to video cameras, especially in the late 80’s. What is the earliest recorded piece you have and is there a cutoff year for found video in the festival?
JOE: The late '80s and early '90s were really the golden age of VHS. It was around then that video became really affordable and easy to produce. All you had to do was hit a red button and you were making a video. Home movies, music videos, industrial training videos all emerged at a furious pace. The earliest video we have was from 1981. It's an excerpt from one of the very first home shopping shows called "America's Value Network." It features two obnoxious (and probably coked-up) hosts trying to sell plastic crap. It's hilarious, and not only because of their mustaches. Home shopping was a new thing at the time and they were literally making it up as they went along.
Digital video is the standard now, but that doesn't mean that people are done recording their bad ideas. In our latest show, we have a how-to DVD put out by an Elvis impersonator specifically for other Elvis impersonators. It feels like every conceivable idea has been put on video in one way or another.
Is there a chance that Tim and Eric ripped off your idea and rather than going to the trouble of finding video, simply create their own? If so, what would be an appropriate punishment for said offense?
NICK PRUEHER: We love that show and feel like we were sort of separated at birth from Tim and Eric. We're the same age and we share a love of cruddy VHS production values and public access TV weirdoes. If they needed to be punished, I think having to work with people like Richard Dunn and James Quall is punishment enough.
How much do you feel natural selection plays into some of the things you’ve seen? What is the most inexplicable piece of video you’ve ever come across?
NICK: In the show we're bringing to Houston, we feature a public access show called "Something's Happening." It was sent to us without any explanation from a guy in Denver and it turned out to be one of the most unusual things we've seen committed to videotape. Without giving too much away, I'll just say that it involves grape juice, mucous, and a blowtorch.
One might assume that garage sales and garbage cans are common cultivation sites for found footage; Where is the most unusual place you find pieces for your collection?
JOE: Garage sales and thrift stores (specifically Salvation Armys) are the most reliable places to find videos. One time, though, my wife and I were at an estate sale in Queens and there was a camcorder for sale for, like, $5. I had to have it. So I brought it home, plugged it in, and out popped a VHS tape with the craziest home movie on it. Not "crazy" in a pornographic way, but "crazy" in a directed-by-David-Lynch way. We feature it in our FFF Vol. 2 DVD.
If someone has ‘found footage’ and wishes to contribute to the festival, can they and how so?
JOE: Yes. Absolutely. Contributions are how we keep this show going. They can either bring it to the show or send it to us. We understand how precious these videos are, so we always make a copy of them right away and send them back. They're in good hands.
Do most of the videos come from the US or is there an international representation to the festival? Will FFF ever have an international-only exhibition?
JOE: All the videos up to this point have been US and Canada produced. A couple years ago, though, we did a few shows in Paris and Amsterdam. In Paris, we were presenting these videos to an exclusively French-speaking audience and one thing we realized was that these stupid videos speak an international language. Or maybe they just like laughing at Americans.
Assuming the only thing paleontologists find in several thousand years is your collection of found footage, what impressions do you think they would have of 21st century humankind? If you had some type of magical unicorn-like power to take footage from certain events in human history, which do you think would fit best with the festival?
NICK: I'm not sure what our videos say about the human condition, but it's not pretty. On the other hand, if you're only looking at AFI's top films of the 1980s and '90s, you're not getting a very complete picture of our culture during that time period. We think these disposable, regrettable pieces of videotape say just as much about us as a people as do our greatest works of art, and we somehow see it as our duty to preserve them. The Roman Empire would have been a good time period for the Found Footage Festival. Can you imagine the hilarious sex tapes Caligula would have made?
Houstonist would enjoy checking out some Caesar action and we're quite sure Lady Godiva could give Lindsay Lohan a run for her money...
Found Footage Festival
Alamo Drafthouse - West Oaks
Saturday, May 9th 10 PM
Cost: $10
Photos courtesy of Found Footage Festival
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