Tomorrow kicks off Volume 4 of the Found Footage Festival, featuring four shows of found video clips and live comedy (and also free beer!). Henry Melcher spoke with curator Nick Prueher about foulmouthed RV salesman, 1980s dating videos and other things to expect from this weekend’s festivities. What will be different about this festival compared to older ones?
It’s all new footage of stuff we’ve found over the last year from collectors and from our travels. Every time we stop in a new city, we stop at the local thrift stores and garage sales and look for new footage. We’ve got tons of bad Saturday morning cartoons, public access TV footage and a home movie heavy metal instructional video; it’s just a whole cavalcade of weird stuff that hasn’t been seen anywhere else.
Do you have some favorite pieces from this year?
There’s one video that was given to us by David Cross that’s a 1980 video dating reel that they’d send out to women and they could contact guys through it—it’s all these 80’s dudes with mustaches and they’re all wearing bad sweaters and they just had nothing interesting to say about themselves or what they’re looking for.
Do you provide commentary or opinion during the show?
It’s kind of like a guided tour through our collection of found videos. We’re making smart-ass remarks along with them and we do little bits based on the footage also. So we’ve got clips of our failed Saturday morning cartoon, Found Footage Festival mysteries never quit got off the ground and stuff like that. We’re doing a video-dating segment of our own so we do little bits based on the footage that we see.
You must have good stories about encounters you may have had when looking for old footage.
The very first footage that we found that really took off was from a promotional video for Winnebago RV’s. The crew on the shoot, we knew one of the guys, had two weeks of footage and it turns out the host didn’t know what he was doing and so he got way in over his head and got fed up and kept swearing and screaming, basically losing his mind. So they kept the cameras rolling in-between takes and captured this guy’s descent into madness. We cut together our favorite moments of him losing his shit into a four minute montage that we called “Jack Rebney: The World’s Angriest RV Salesman”. It became this big hit at our shows, he was like the holy grail of people we wanted to meet. We figured he was long dead form an ulcer or some sort of anger related stress issue, but it turns out a friend of his came to our show in Las Vegas and told us Jack was alive and well.
When he found out we were showing his video he was pretty pissed off, believe it or not, but we convinced him to appear with us at a show in San Francisco and he was a bit abrasive at first but when he saw how many people were there enjoying this video his heart sort of melted and he smiled and came down and regaled the audience with stories and we actually hugged at the end.
How does seeing something at the FFF differ from watching a ridiculous old clip on YouTube?
YouTube’s great for getting a video in your inbox and laughing and then you sort of forget about it, but for us, we’ve got personal stories behind where we’ve found each of the videos, we’ve lavished them with far more attention than they deserve in most cases. We really do our homework, we explain to people how and where we found them, we give back-story on these videos. I think that’s what you need, you need a guide to take you through the stuff and we’re sort of masochists so we’re happy to do that.
Anything else you’d like to tell people coming to the festival?
We encourage people, if they’ve found footage, to tell us about it or bring it to the show. That’s how we keep the show going is by meeting other people who’ve found stuff and want to donate it to the cause. We definitely encourage anyone to do that at the world premiere in New York.
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