Found Footage Festival founders flog filmic flotsam for fun

Between them, Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, buddies since sixth grade, have a string of assorted credits that includes The Onion, Late Night with David Letterman and Mystery Science Theater 3000. But it's as connoisseurs of video dumpster-diving that they've altered the cosmos. Since 1991, they've scoured Goodwill stores, yard sales and other treasure troves for bizarre videos. Now they pass along their finds via the Found Footage Festival, rolling into Nashville Sunday night at The Belcourt.

By email, co-host/co-founder Prueher tantalized us with hints about Sunday's show, such as a wresting video with Tennessee ties. We begged for more.

Well, you can't just drop a bomb like this and walk away: What's the deal with the hunky pro wrestlers from Tennessee?

Nick Prueher: We found an introductory music video by a tag-team wrestling duo from Memphis called The Fabulous Ones. They were these bearded hunks whose whole gimmick was that they were real ladies' men. They're sipping wine in a bathtub, lounging around shirtless in tight jeans in a barn, wearing robes while brushing their hair. This video is the most unintentionally homoerotic thing I've ever seen. Apparently, Jerry Lawler's Memphis wrestling circuit was among the first to incorporate music videos, so this is a real gem from the early '80s.

Was there any one video you can cite as the beginning of your fascination with found footage?

NP: We sort of trace it all back to this training video for custodians that I found in the break room of a McDonald's where I was working in high school. Out of boredom one day, I popped it in the VCR in the break room and couldn't believe what I saw. It tried to have a cute plot where we followed a McDonald's custodian's first day on the job while his overly perky crew trainer showed him the ropes. As if it was already demeaning enough to be a custodian at McDonald's, they made you sit through this insulting video. My immediate reaction was, "The world needs to see this video," so I put it in my backpack and immediately showed [fellow Found Footage Festival founder] Joe [Pickett]. We just became obsessed with this tape, inviting friends over to watch it and make jokes. Eventually we decided, if there are videos this ridiculous right under our noses, imagine what else is out there. And so began our quest to search in out-of-the-way places like thrift stores, break rooms, and garage sales for discarded VHS tapes.

What elements separate a truly jaw-dropping Found Footage find from, say, your neighbor's vacation slides?

NP: Our main criterion is that is has to be unintentionally funny. Whatever it was trying to do — train you how to flip burgers, teach you how to exercise, or simply entertain you — it has to fail at colossally. Luckily, in the late '80s and early '90s, there were a lot of people out there with bad ideas who had access to video equipment.

If you had to show someone one clip to explain the magic of Found Footage, what would it be?

NP: I would probably show them "It Only Takes A Second," an industrial video we found in Minneapolis in 1999. It was put out by this insurance company, apparently to scare their clients into being safe. So it's basically just a series of reenactments of on-the-job accidents, each one more hilarious than the one before it. For a video that was intended to be gravely serious, it couldn't have been edited any funnier. Now imagine watching this video that was meant to be watched with a straight face in a conference room projected on a big screen in a room with 300 people who are there to laugh. That's the magic of the Found Footage Festival.

Is VHS funnier than digital?

NP: I think so. Joe and I grew up watching VHS, so we have a special affinity to the format. There's something utterly charming about the bad tracking, washed out colors, and analog clunkiness of VHS footage that you don't get on a slick digital video camera or a webcam.

Do you have a secret stash of stuff too bizarre, upsetting, raunchy or extreme to show in public? And if so, what might be found in it?

NP: Where it crosses the line for us is when it's not funny. There's one tape we got from a friend that we decided not to include in the show. It's a fan video that a girl made for the guitar player Steve Vai. In it, she tries to impress Steve Vai by doing various stunts with various parts of her body. It's pretty goofy stuff, but the woman clearly has a few screws loose, so it comes off as more disturbing than funny. When you see the show, though, you'll see that we clearly don't have any qualms about showing graphic stuff if it's funny. There will be some full frontal male nudity.

Without giving away any cratedigger secrets, what are typically the best kinds of places to find these discoveries?

NP: Over the years, we've had a lot of luck at Salvation Army thrift stores. At a Goodwill, you're mostly going to find used movies like Jerry Maguire on VHS, but at Salvation Army, they don't filter out any of the weird ones. We've found home movies, training videos and lots of other strange gems there. Estate sales can also be good. People often sell their old VHS camcorders there and often forget to eject their tapes before selling them.

Has the ubiquity of YouTube made it harder or easier for you to find material, and has it raised the stakes for found-footage weirdness?

NP: We've been collecting VHS oddities since 1991, long before YouTube came into existence, so we weren't sure how it would effect us. But we've found that it's actually increased people's understanding and appreciation of what we do. When we started doing the Found Footage Festival in 2004, people would sometimes say, "But why would we want to come watch bad footage?" Now that people have seen these sort of things on the internet, they know about what to expect.

Also, now that there's such a glut of material out there, people really recognize the need for someone to watch everything and separate the wheat from the chaff. We've been doing that for almost 20 years. And since everything in the show is stuff we've found on physical media, it's generally not stuff you're going to see on the internet or anywhere else, including our own website.

Have you met any of the people in your tapes, and how did the meetings go? Were they surprised to learn people had seen them? Were they upset about the way the clips are being used?

NP: We always try to track down the people in the videos — to us, they are like celebrities — and without fail, they've all been flattered by the attention. The one close call was with Jack Rebney, a guy we dubbed "The World's Angriest R.V. Salesman." We found footage many years ago of this guy, Jack, doing an industrial video about Winnebago R.V.s and it became a real hit of our first touring show. Jack kept losing his temper on the show and going off on these angry tirades, the best of which we edited together in a four-minute clip.

Somehow, we managed to convince Jack to appear with us at a show in San Francisco last year. We were understandably nervous to meet him and he was pretty prickly when we first encountered him. While we played the video, we watched him in the back of the theater with his arms folder and a scowl on his face, but as he heard people erupt in laughter, a little smile came over his face. It was like the Grinch — his heart grew 10 times its size. At the end of the show, he had people lined up ten-deep to get his autograph and meet him. And we actually hugged at the end! We can die happy.

Have you ever found a tape you thought of turning in to the police?

NP: We found a video called "How to Seduce Women Through Hypnosis," which should probably be illegal.

Does Found Footage count as 15 minutes of fame?

NP: I think so. We lavish these forgotten scraps of VHS tape with far more attention than they deserve, so to Joe and I and the people who come to the shows, these folks are definitely celebrities. Meeting the guy from the insurance safety video is far more meaningful than it would be to meet Tom Cruise.

Which Found Footage "star" most deserves a Nashville recording contract, and why? And have you ever found any Nashville-related Found Footage gold?

NP: There's a guy named Alan Gillett from suburban Chicago who actually drove down to Nashville to appear on a cable access Star Search-like show and totally deserves some sort of contract. He sings 10 songs karaoke-style, the highlight of which is his rendition of "Personality," sung is his Kermit the Frog-like intonation. But the best part is that he keeps doing this adorable little dance while singing against the blue-screen backdrop of the studio, which they didn't bother to chroma-key out with anything more exciting. It's like the perfect storm of what makes a great video.

Is it just us, or have regional commercials gotten a lot more boring over the past decade?

NP: I'm not so sure. We travel all over the country for the show and we see a lot of awesome local commercials. Actually, we were just in Arkansas for the first time a few weeks ago and saw a whole series of local infomercials for places like meat shops and menswear stores hosted by this colorful African American gentleman smoking a huge cigar.

We've also got a great local commercial from the '80s in the show we're bringing to Nashville. It stars a local furniture store owner named Bargain Bernie whose catchphrase is "All I want to do is save you money!"

If you could say just one word to the makers of "The ABCs of Sex Education for Trainables," what would it be?

NP: "Thanks." Funny story, actually. We were in North Carolina a couple of months ago and were invited to the home/office of Skip Elsheimer, the world's leading collector of old education film reels. Joe and I have been big fans of "Sex Education for Trainables" — one of Skip's finds — for years and we asked him about it. He dropped a bombshell by telling us that they actually made a sequel called "Sex Education for Educables," which I guess was the term at the time for higher functioning people with cognitive disabilities. So we sat on Skip's couch as he projected it for us on his living room wall. It was a great afternoon.

Please cast the upcoming movie version of The A-Team with Found Footage superstars.

NP: Hannibal would be Harvey Sid Fisher, the singer and songwriter behind Astrology Songs. Harvey wrote a song for each sign of the zodiac and then went down to his local public-access studio to record a video demo, complete with interpretive dancers. He just looks a lot like George Peppard. Faceman would probably be played by Pretty Boy Floyd, a professional pool player in the '80s who released a confusing video called Learn the Secrets of Hustling Pool. For Murdock, I'd go with Arthur Bloom, a man who appeared on a cable access show called Something's Happening to explain his system for removing toxic mucus from your mouth by using grape juice and a spray bottle. Murdock was sort of playfully insane on The A-Team. Arthur Bloom is the real deal.

Finally, for B.A. Baracus, I'd be a fool not to go with Mr. T, who was the star of a 1986 educational video called Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool. Why mess with perfect casting?