The Found Footage Festival will be in town again on Thursday night! We got in touch with founders Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher to find out what’s on tap this year. Expect full-frontal nudity…
I’ve only been forced to watch one corporate training video in my life — a gem from Staples that likened sexual harassment to driving your car into the side of a mountain.
My tenure at the store was, accordingly, brief.
But I’ve never forgiven Staples for the hour I spent watching that video. The worst part was that no one else was in the room with me to witness it and affirm that it was, in fact, the most poorly conceived idea in history.
Enter the Found Footage Festival: a chance for all of us to take one big, cathartic dump on the people who make these videos.
The Festival takes clips from old VHS tapes in thrift stores, garage sales, warehouses, estate sales, and dumpsters and whittles them down to a 2-hour, live comedy event, featuring home movies, public access television shows, and misadventures in corporate education.
Among other things, this year’s showing at Coolidge Corner Theater on Thursday night has a 3-minute montage of sexual harassment videos, and I cannot wait to see it with a live audience.
Found Footage Festival 2008 Trailer
“Read More” for an interview with the festival co-founders!
How do you decide what makes the cut when you’re screening films?
JP: It’s a needle in a haystack to find a truly solid video. And we’ve found that the videos that work best are the unintentionally funny ones — the stuff trying to be dead serious.
Have you ever pulled a clip out because it fell flat with the audience?
JP: Yeah, we’ve had to pull clips before. In this particular show, one thing we learned is that nude men are funnier than nude women. We had two clips that were intended to compliment each other: one was a montage of videos featuring “hunks” (Fabio, a Playgirl exercise video, a pair of homoerotic amateur wrestlers, et al; the other was a montage of videos featuring “babes” (nude Macarena, nude golf, nude figure skating, etc.).
Before we started touring this show, we tested all our clips with smaller comedy club audiences, and we realized that nobody would laugh at the nude women, even though they were doing the most ridiculous stuff. But everyone was laughing at the nude/semi-nude men.
We were baffled by this phenomenon. Are we, as a culture, that used to seeing naked women figure skating? So, we decided to take the babes out of the show (we now feature the “Babes” segment as a bonus feature on our new DVD) and stick with the hunks.
As such, one thing we feature at every FFF show is full-frontal male nudity.
Does it ever get old to see these clips or do you find something about them indelibly funny?
JP: There are some that became painful to watch after the 70th time. In our first volume, we featured a video put out by a post-rehab, Corey Haim. It was basically a vanity project where he answered his own questions, like, “What does kissing really mean to me?” It was funny the first 30 times, but after that, I had to put in ear plugs.
On the other hand, some videos are like a fine, aged wine. Home movies and public access videos never cease to entertain me. I’m particularly proud of our montages, which rarely ever get old. One of my favorite montages features 17 sexual harassment videos whittled down to three minutes of the what-not-to-do reenactments. The edit is so dense that I still find new things in it.
Most articles about the FFF make, at the very least, a glancing reference to the “found art” movement, and the ballsiest invoke Marcel Duchamp. Do you see the Festival as something other than comedy?
JP: Not really. Nick and I both have a background in comedy, and that’s really the intent of this show. But I feel like people laugh at these videos beyond the funny hairstyles and the silly outfits.
One thing that I think is funny is how obsessed our culture has been with video. In the early 90s, video finally became cheap and easy to produce, so everyone rushed out to make one — whether it was a home movie, a celebrity exercise video, or a video on how to massage your cat. People were shitting out videos at a furious pace. We bombard our audience with so many of these stupid videos that it becomes dreadfully apparent that human beings have churned out way too many videos.
And most of these shat-out videos weren’t intended for mass audiences; they were stuff you’d typically watch by yourself in a work breakroom or in your living room. It’s these videos — the ones you don’t usually watch with anyone else — that somehow become funnier when you watch them with a room full of people. Sometimes I think it’s cathartic to laugh at these with other people (especially the training videos).
Where will the FFF go from here?
JP: We’re in the midst of our Fall/Winter tour. We’ll be touring 25+ cities through December and promoting our new DVD, which can be purchased at www.foundfootagefestival.com.
We’ve been in talks with TV and web producers about doing some sort of Found Footage series, but nothing has really come to fruition yet. For now, things are going well with the live shows. And we really enjoy hitting up the local thrift stores and garage sales at every town we visit. Luckily for us, there are plenty more videos out there to be found.