“Let’s begin,” Greer Childers says. She sports an enormous perm and a shiny pink leotard. She stares into the video camera, which is filming in what appears to be her living room. There is a potted plant behind her, her white sneakers rest on a beige carpet, and a fireplace with plastic grapes adorning the mantelpiece. You expect her to show you a stretch or dance move.
Curators Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett introduce another found video from their massive collection. Photo by Josh Hertz.
Instead, she gasps—not a dainty gasp, but a violent, sudden intake. Her eyes shut with the effort, then burst open while she exhales with incredible force. It sounds like she’s hocked up a hairball. Her entire body deflates like a whoopee cushion. She rocks forward, her eyes roll into the top of her head and her tongue lops from her pink mouth. She freezes in this position for several beats, faintly wobbling while the upbeat soundtrack plays. She might explode. She might collapse. She might pass out. It is, in every respect, hysterical—except to Greer Childers.
Childer’s “Bodyflex” tape is a perfect example of what makes a Found Footage Fest video: it has to be in a physical format and unintentionally funny. Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett are the hosts and creators of Found Footage Fest, a film festival compiled of clips from VHS. Prueher and Pickett acts as hosts, and travel the country showing clips to audiences that range from one hundred to two hundred people. The videos are “found” in thrift stores.
The video that spawned FFF was a McDonald’s training video. A teenage Prueher found an old training video for custodians in a break room at the McDonald’s where he worked. The video was hokey and rife with unintentional sexual tension. He and his best friend Joe Pickett decided that they had to share this with their friends, who found it hilarious. Based on their friends’ reaction, it appeared that there was a weird human attraction to unintentionally funny, outdated VHS videos.
Subjects of the videos range from training videos to jazzercise to self-hypnosis to just plain strange, such as Rent-A-Friend. In the 1980s, video recording became cheap and therefore accessible. There was a surge of video, which eventually found homes in local thrift stores, often still wrapped in their original plastic covers. The widespread instinct among people to pick up the camera and film their stupid ideas, even in the pre-YouTube era, fascinates Prueher.
“I think we’re a video obsessed culture. There was no idea too stupid to commit to videotape,” Prueher says affectionately. “It shows that we’re a very ambitious people, we’re gung-ho, and we have a lot of bad ideas. We may not have the most talent, but that doesn’t stop us. That’s the American spirit.”
One of those terrible ideas was Rent-A-Friend. Prueher and Pickett discovered the video in a Chicago thrift store. They hadn’t had any luck finding material for their fifth tour of Found Footage Fest and were beginning to suspect they had unearthed all the bad-but-funny videos there were to find.
“Rent-A-Friend rescued us,” says Prueher. He describes it as a weird concept video. “If you were lonely, you could put this tape in the VCR and this guy on the video would be your friend. He starts off asking you questions about yourself that you’re supposed to answer. Then he starts telling you about himself but he runs out of things to talk about. He winds up revealing far too much about himself. You watch this guy unravel before your eyes.”
The distinction that separates FFF from America’s Funniest Home Videos (which, in Prueher’s opinion, is the funniest show on television) is that most of these films are professional. These ideas actually got funding, from awkward, badly-written training videos to self-hypnotizing people, to becoming better racquetball players.
“They get people to invest in it, produce it—it’s incredibly ambitious to get people to do as an entrepreneurs,” says Prueher. And yet, the fundamental idea is terrible.”
Perhaps even more puzzling is the question of why so many people in 2011 enjoy watching a reel of VHS clips that are up to 30 years old. Many in the audience were too young or not born yet when these videos were recorded, so there’s no nostalgia for those shiny pink leotards and poofy hairstyles in the jazzercise videos. They’re laughing at the past. For the rest, it’s awkwardly familiar. Jazzercise videos usually receive the most audience reaction, seconded by full-frontal close-ups of male genitals.
“There’s something uncomfortably familiar about the shiny leotards,” says Prueher. “In the first tour, we included a medical video about a punk device in the pre-viagra days that you use to get an erection. Seeing full-frontal male nudity in close-up on a big screen got a huge reaction—people turning, screaming, covering their eyes. We thought it’s kind of fun to torture people with that, so we include full-frontal male nudity in every tour.”
The current tour also plays Heavy Metal Parking Lot—”the greatest 15 minutes ever compiled on tape”—before the show begins. Heavy Metal Parking Lot is a 1985 video filmed by two guys in the parking lot of a Judas Priest concert. Additionally at the New Orleans show, one of the clip’s “stars”, now 33 and attending culinary school in New Orleans, will speak to the audience about his video, intended to be a kid’s review of Walt Disney World. The red-headed, precocious kid barks orders at the camera person and complains about the timing of cuts. He’s an eleven-year-old diva.
On March 27, Found Footage Fest’s 5th tour comes to Chalmette Movies. The show starts at 7 p.m. Prueher and Pickett haven’t been to New Orleans yet. They highly encourage people to bring in any finds, which only have to meet two requirements: it must be on a physical format and unintentionally funny. Tickets are available HERE.
