New Media Funhouse Substack is up and running

Filmmaker Yannick Bellon.

I have really enjoyed posting pieces here on the ol’ blogspot for the past 19 of years. One thing has been rather maddening, though — even though this entire platform (Blogger) is owned by Google, Google now refuses to index blogs like this one.

I went and hired an SEO expert to look into it, and he was able to give me some additional views on these pages, but he couldn’t get Google to list the blog. (He had certain conjectures as to why this was happening, but each one involved completely redoing the way I approach this blog and moving all the contents of it to my regular site.)

So, we have a problem: The first 15 years of the blog are searchable on Google, but the last four, in which I’ve done entries that I’m very proud of, including full-length surveys of the careers of political filmmakers like Ken Loach and Elio Petri, are just incapable of being “crawled” by the robots that run Google.

At some point in the near future I might available myself of the suggestions that the SEO contractor gave me, but in the meantime I decided to experiment with the Substack platform, which seems like the “place to be” for writers about politics and popular culture. So far I’ve posted five entries and wanted to promote them here, since I will be coming back here to post some items, because I’ve already discovered the limitations of Substack.

Currently, the Media Funhouse Substack is entirely FREE, and I aim to keep it that way for as long as I can. In the meantime, let me post links to the pieces that have appeared thus far. And they lead to yet another “survey” of an underappreciated filmmaker’s work — in this case French writer-director Yannick Bellon.

The first official post revisited my 1997 interview with the Uncle Floyd Show cast in the dressing room of the Bottom Line. Since Floyd’s passing on Jan. 22 of this year, I’ve been finally allowed to post the full interview on YouTube with Floyd’s name on it. The reason I had to take his name off was a miscalculation (okay, let’s just say it, a big error) that Floyd made and then passed on to his manager, in terms of the old clips being posted online. At some other point I will discuss how bizarre the rulings were in reference to posting clips from the Uncle Floyd Show, or simply even the cast being interviewed, as happened on the Funhouse. 

Suffice it to say, when COVID hit and Floyd couldn’t work at local venues as a mostly anonymous pianist, and then he was very sadly beset by the virus, and cancer, and then finally a crippling stroke, it was the clips that had been banned by Floyd for so long that brought in his final income. The show (which had last more than 25 years) was indeed his legacy and a potential money-earner, but there was no way to broach that topic when he was in “anonymous pianist in obscure locales in N.J.” mode…. 

The Uncle Floyd post can be found here on the Substack.

The next item up on the new platform (which is FULLY FREE, in case I didn’t emphasize that enough) was a litany of the times that Serge Gainsbourg’s music was translated into English, spawned by me hearing what is most likely the very first attempt to join a beautiful Serge melody with a (rather silly) English lyric, sung by none other than Pussy Galore. (The actress who played same, not the band.)

The “Serge en anglais” post is here.

The next post on the Substack was a matter of personal pride, since very little has been written in English about the work of French filmmaker Yannick Bellon. I attended all the screenings in a retrospective of her work at L'Alliance NYC that spanned a few months in 2025 and decided to do a “survey” piece on the films, which remain utterly unobtainable over here with English subs. Except for, that is, my favorite of the whole bunch, a great piece about memory and aging starring Bulle Ogier, which is currently on YT with subtitles available.

Bulle Ogier and Loleh Bellon.

The first piece on Bellon is here.

The second half of my piece about Bellon’s filmmaking career (focusing primarily on her fiction films, since she made two decades’ worth of documentaries and short films for different outlets, including French television) covers the last dozen years of her output, which ranges from two very strong character studies to two intriguing breaks from her traditional pattern. (With one definitely worthy of comparison to her earlier fiction films.) Plus, some capsules on documentaries shown in the NYC festival of her work. 

Yannick Bellon and Loleh Bellon.

The second piece on Bellon can be found here.

I will again note that the Substack for Media Funhouse is totally FREE and will have yet another piece up in a day or two. (Potential title: “How I Got Bootlegged.”)

Mike Kuchar: the second Funhouse interview!

Mike, in a photo from the
@kucharbrothers Instagram.

I have only had the opportunity to do three “second interviews” thus far on the Funhouse (those people were filmmakers Hal Hartley and Guy Maddin, and indie/exploitation pioneer David F. Friedman). The most “up-close and personal” second interview I’ve been able to do was a recent reunion with Funhouse guest Mike Kuchar, whom I got to speak to in his apartment in San Francisco.

I originally spoke to Mike back in 2009 at the Anthology Film Archives before a mini-festival of his work. During that talk, I mostly stuck with the period of time that I had videos to go with, so I centered on his initial 16mm solo features and his later videos, made on mini-DV (the format on which I was making the Funhouse at that time; he got a lot better use of it than I did!).

Short segments from those interviews can be found here and here. For whatever reasons, the latter (a lively discussion by Mike of how he made Sins of the Fleshapoids, replete with a discussion of the film stock!) is not searchable on YouTube with the phrases “Mike Kuchar” and “Media Funhouse.” For some reason unknown to me (but surely known to the robots that run YouTube — the main reason I can’t post entire Funhouse episodes on there), you can only find it if you search for “Sins of the Fleshapoids” and “Media Funhouse.”

In any case, that interview went extremely well. The lighting and location (inside AFA’s small Maya Deren Room) were absolutely perfect, and the discussion was terrific. Mike even told me he had shown the two episodes on which I based the episode to some students in his class at the San Francisco Art Institute. (Mike took over his brother George’s classes when George died in 2011.)

I knew there was much more to explore there, so when I traveled to San Francisco this past September for fun, I was very happy to be able to meet with Mike and interview him again. This time I focused on the initial years that the Kuchar Brothers made movies and went into depth with Mike about his solo videos, especially the work he has done since we last spoke, as well as the advice he gave his students while teaching at the Art Institute.

I’m now editing the material from the interview and wanted to give Funhouse blog readers (and those inveterate YT watchers) a preview of the talk. Two previews, in fact. 

The first clip finds Mike talking about the “parties” he and his brother threw, which were in fact movie shoots. They would gather their friends and neighbors and shoot wonderfully lurid take-offs on Hollywood melodramas at one party and then show the edited version of the film at another. He also talks about the division of labor between the two, which was apparently equal.

 

The second clip has to do with the moment that the Kuchar brothers were “discovered.” This happened via their films being projected at Ken Jacobs’ loft on Ferry Street in downtown Manhattan. Jacobs had movie nights at his loft, and the Kuchars were alerted by a friend, Bob Cowan (who subsequently starred in Mike’s best-known opus, Sins of the Fleshapoids).

At one of Jacobs’ movie nights was the filmmaker-critic Jonas Mekas, who was so entranced by the Kuchar brothers’ efforts on 8mm that he promoted them heavily in his column in The Village Voice, which got them a great deal of attention (to, among many others, a young aspiring filmmaker in Baltimore named John Waters).

 

I’ll be doing two episodes from this interview. I look forward to airing it, as I have been a diehard Kuchar fan (of both Mike and George, together and apart) for a few decades now and was very happy to dig deeper into their past with Mike. 

He’s currently 83 and continues to make videos on the ultra-low budgets that the Kuchar brothers were famous for. He headed in a different direction than George back in the late Sixties and has continued to make his own brand of underground cinema from his apartment, using video and now even online editing tools! There are several things to marvel at when considering Mike’s work, but the first and foremost is always how gorgeous the imagery is for the amount of money spent (which is nominal, to say the least).

I’m also happy to report that, when I revisited Mike after the interview, we spoke about a number of things, including the filmmaking fans of the Kuchars (who range from, of course, John Waters to modern makers of horror pics like Guillermo Del Toro and some guy named Lucas, owns a ranch someplace in the hills…). We also had a fine discussion of Japanese monster and fantasy pics, focusing on the Godzilla movies (since I had come from a Godzilla convention that day), which Mike is a big fan of. 

My thanks go out to Mike for serving as host to myself, my cameraman in L.A. (Jim Gonis), and my NYC cameraman (Charles Frenkel). His apartment is a palace of wonderment (with a pantheistic array of statues of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman gods, as well as pics and movie posters representing his work and that of George), and he is a very cordial host who is more than willing to review and reflect on his work (and George’s). He most likely would reject this designation, but the guy’s a legend in the underground world and in the world of filmmaking as a whole.