By now most people have seen the hilarious Duck and Cover video. You know, the 1950 informational video that showed us all how to survive a massive nuclear attack or atomic radiation by — surprise! — squatting under a school desk.
Then there’s the infamous “Reefer Madness” from 1936, a film attempting to terrify kids with the dangerous effects of marijuana. Did you know that if you smoke a joint, you will be possessed with the urge to violently attack your friends with lethal weapons before being committed as criminally insane? And you thought it was all eating Bugles and watching South Park.
If you get a chuckle out of those flicks, you should have no trouble laughing your ass off when the Found Footage Festival hits the Beachland. Nick Prueher, co-curator and host, spoke to Buzzbin briefly about the cult following of this often-hysterical festival.
According to Prueher, the Found Footage Festival is a guided tour through a collection of thrift-store and garage-sale videotape finds from across the country. From training videos to exercise videos, promotional videos to home movies, you name it and they have found it.
“It’s stuff that wasn’t meant to be shown in public, which is why it’s so fun to show it in public,” said Prueher, who co-curates the festival each year with Joe Pickett.
Prueher and others have been doing a version of the Found Footage Festival for friends in their living rooms since 1991, though the first official Found Footage Festival show was in 2004 in New York. Prueher had been collecting odd VHS tapes for more than a decade when he decided to try and make something bigger with them.
“One day we just decided it might be fun to put together our favorite bits, rent out a theater in Manhattan and see if anyone would show up to check it out,” he said. “To our surprise, the very first show sold out and people beyond our immediate circle of friends really seemed to get a kick out of it.”
The one-time theater show gradually evolved into a full-blown tour. “After that first show went so well, we started getting offers from theaters in Minneapolis and Tucson who had heard about it and wanted us to play their cities. Now we’re on the road nine months a year, doing over 100 shows annually,” Prueher said. “It continues to amaze us how many people are into this very specific thing that we thought only a handful of friends enjoyed.”
One of the best parts of the tour for Prueher and his co-curator is the chance to meet some of the people who’ve appeared in the videos they find.
“We’ve scrutinized these tapes more than most film historians,” he said. “We know every movement, every piece of dialogue, so when we meet these people it’s like meeting celebrities.”
A career highlight came a couple of years ago in San Francisco when the two were able to convince a man named Jack Rebney to appear with them at a show. Known as the “The World’s Angriest RV Salesman”, Rebney starred in the now-notorious Winnebago promotional videos, memorialized in the recent documentary “The Winnebago Man”.
“He was apparently pretty pissed off when he found out we were showing these outtakes, but when he saw how much joy it was bringing the audience, he actually hugged us,” Prueher told Buzzbin.
Finding humorous gems like these in the mire of thousands of hours of videotape isn’t easy, he admitted. “It takes many soul-crushing hours to watch the hundreds of videos we find every year looking for little nuggets to include in the show, so I admire the fact that we haven’t gone insane yet,” he said. “I think we’ve developed a high tolerance for awful videos, like a callous to shield ourselves against the pain.”
Still, he loves the work and still gets excited when a new tape arrived in the mail. (They accept submissions for people who’ve found good examples of horrible old tape.) “It’s like Christmas morning whenever we get a package in the mail,” he said.
One caveat: Watch at your own risk.
“One time in Chicago, a guy passed out during a medical video with a close-up shot of a man’s testicles,” Prueher said. “After he came to, though, he stayed and watched the rest of the show, so we took that as a compliment.”
The Found Footage Festival is coming to the Beachland Ballroom on March 17. Show starts at 8. Tickets are $11.
