Kuchar movies and other underground classics -- Catch 'em while you can!

Two classy men of the Bronx.
(George and Mike Kuchar)

There are countless articles appearing each week about the availability (or non-availability) of different films. The general consensus among diehard cinephiles is that, while certain streaming services are very good at presenting arthouse and indie cinema, the best way to get and keep the films is through owning “physical media” (the new name for discs, tapes, what-have-you).

But then again, there are those films that are just simply NEVER going to appear on any streaming service. The ones that are not “economically viable” to acquire and only have a “limited audience.” Those of us who want to see these films thus have to scrounge, and when a trove of them appears on the most visible (and most visited) video site on the Net, I have to draw your attention to them.

In this case, I felt that I should do this sooner than later, even though the poster in question — a gent named “Ray Cathode” — is still in the process of building his channel. The reason I feel I have to do this right away is that he’s including one filmmaker in the bunch whose Estate generally hounds people who reproduce or post his films. (My take on this: They don’t want the secret getting out — that secret being that his films were numbingly dull until others came along and directed the films for him.)

From the above, I’m sure you can guess who I’m talking about. (Further clues would include the wearing of a wig, the state of Pennsylvania, and soup.) Including this particular artist’s films gets your account taken down – even the YT channels that used to hide his work by renaming the films and never posting his name (and removing the initial credit for a specific museum) went down.

Thus, I urge you to see the films that “Ray” has put up before any litigious pains in the ass decide to take action and remove his trove from public view. For this person (I’ve been using the male pronoun since the person is using a male name) has put up a veritable treasure chest of underground and weirdo cinema.

Mike Kuchar.

I will put the emphasis here on two gents whose work I absolutely love and have saluted before many times on the Funhouse TV show and on this blog: Mike and George Kuchar. Twin brothers from the Bronx who gave us some absolutely delightful films that exhibited a super-low-budget style that influenced many who came after them (most prominently John Waters). 

Mike was an interview subject on the Funhouse; I made two episodes out of our talk, which was wonderful — rarely have I had a guest to whom I could speak about "high" and "low" culture in adjoining sentences! I spoke to George about doing an interview, but he was busy at the time he was in NYC. To show you the kind of gent he was, he called me from San Francisco and noted that if I were to come out there he'd love to do the interview. Sadly, that was a short time before his revealing that he had prostate cancer. He left us in 2011.

I’ll link to six items below. I used to be able to make these “survey” blog posts much longer and have many more links, but embedding from YouTube is apparently now in the trash can for blogspot blogs. Despite Blogger and YouTube both being Google properties, there is no cross-pollination between the two sites anymore, and a dedicated person like myself can go insane trying to find videos that CAN be embedded at this point.

George Kuchar (and friends).

For some reason, the whole enterprise has transformed into a situation where YT embeds are blocked, providing the blogger with a black screen with a “watch on YouTube” link. As that is incredibly ugly and extremely pointless, I’ll be doing fewer blog entries that link to YouTube videos, because: a.) sites like ok.ru have a broader variety of films anyway (including several Media Funhouse episodes!), and b.) the notion of “experimenting” with HTML code to see which videos appear as full thumbnail/old-school embeds and which are black boxes with a YT link is the way to sheer madness.

In the meantime, here are five links-with-thumbnail image and one actual embed. (I guess the film in question slipped through the net.)

“Tootsies in Autumn” is an early 8mm film by Mike Kuchar that shows off the controlled chaos of the brothers’ films — they worked mostly in tandem on the 8mm films, then split to make their own solo 16mm films and, later on, many, many videos.

“Tootsies” is silent cinema reborn as brightly colored kitsch with the soul of an overripe melodrama. 

“Born of the Wind” is another early item that shows off the visual storytelling style. It was directed by Mike and shows off the brothers’ love of (again) melodrama and horror pictures. 

 

“The Craven Sluck” by Mike is a stunner – here is a sci-fi thriller that foreshadows everything in the early work of John Waters. 

Watch “The Craven Sluck.”

“Eclipse of the Sun Virgin” (1967) by George shows off his wonderfully tacky and torrid taste, with Catholic imagery, Americana, pop culture, and the tininess of urban apartments. 

Watch “Eclipse of the Sun Virgin.”

“Forever and Always” (1978) is George’s reflection on relationships. Both Kuchar brothers were gay and both did include homoerotic imagery in their films (Mike’s is mystical and idyllic; George’s was earthy and straight from the crotch), but here he depicts boy-girl love and the inevitable un-romantic thing that results from said union: kids. The site of our female lead carrying around her kids through a children’s carnival tells you all you need to know about the possible benefits of birth control. 

Watch “Forever and Always.” 

“Route 666” (1994) is a crazy and wonderful short video that reflects George’s later concerns: extreme weather (he was a “storm chaser” wannabe, spending weeks in Oklahoma each year to see the big storms come), being haunted by pop culture artifacts (in this case, a marionette with a Donald Duck voice), and indelibly kitschy imagery, taken from gift shops all around the country. 

Watch “Route 666.” 

Those are just six of the Kuchar films on the “Ray Cathode” YT channel. There are 18 more up there as of this writing. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t list the other filmmakers whose works “Ray” has posted.

A quick laundry list on the channel: Anger, Brakhage, Burroughs, Derek Jarman, Ken Russell, Werner Schroeter, Zappa, and yeah, the famous artist-turned-filmmaker (whose work might be down, but hopefully not all of the Cathode channel, by the time you read this.) Also, Ken Jacobs’ seven-hour found-footage epic Star Spangled to Death and, for the kiddies, the Satanic Panic fave “Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults.” 

Note: Thanks to “Ray” for posting all this stuff (a bit of advice: remove the Factory guy’s stuff!) and to Jon Whitehead for leading me toward it.

The ‘confessional’ cinema of Curt McDowell

There are only a few functioning repertory theaters in NYC, but each one serves a specific purpose in terms of its programming and the audience it attracts. The forte of the programmers at the Anthology Film Archives is presenting retrospectives of filmmakers who have “fallen through the cracks” of film history and whose work won’t likely be slated for DVD release any time soon.

Some of these retrospectives receive press attention, others do not — for example, the Marcel Hanoun festival is now a distant memory. A recent five-program festival of the work of filmmaker Curt McDowell (18 out of his 27 films) did receive press coverage. It was linked to a gallery exhibit at Participant Inc on Houston Street called “THINGS: a queer legacy of graphic art and play” (which included several paintings by McDowell) and was co-presented by MIX NYC and the Academy Film Archive. 

A blogger at Strublog has already done a great job of placing McDowell’s films in their context in the gay press, but I wanted to directly discuss the films themselves — McDowell’s style, his experiments in genre, the best (and not-so-best) films, and his particular niche in the underground film world. Two of the special subgenres he pioneered are incredibly absorbing and transformative — the first is his “diary” films about his sex life; the other is his brilliantly funny "mini-musicals," which were, for this reviewer, the best part of the AFA retrospective.

"Beaver Fever" (1974)

I’m going to omit from this account any discussion of McDowell’s best-known film and one of the most unique and memorable cult movies in history, Thundercrack! (1975). That picture deserves its own blog entry and has been on the repertory circuit since it was first released (it is now even on DVD in an authorized edition). It is a savagely funny and lewd combination of an “old dark house” spoof, high melodrama, and hardcore pornography. It was scripted by George Kuchar (Curt’s close friend, mentor, and lover) and qualifies as both McDowell’s and Kuchar’s best-ever full-length feature. More to come on that title.

The reason the Anthology series was so invaluable to those of us who love Thundercrack! is that McDowell’s films have been so difficult to see for so long. Curiously, the institution we can thank for nearly all of the restorations in the festival is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the Oscars may consistently reward the work of tediously conventional moviemakers, but the Academy’s restoration efforts are clearly a lot more open-minded.

"Loads" (1980)

The “confessional”/diary films are entirely unique creations that are as personal as cinema can get. The most famous title, “Loads” (1980, shot earlier), finds McDowell narrating, telling us about the men he brought back to the loft space he used as his studio for sex. His objects of obsession were effortlessly macho straight men, who were fine with showing their bodies to Curt’s camera.

The film is definitely art, but it also contains hardcore porn imagery. McDowell gives blow jobs to his subjects and is left at points with jizz in his mustache (this is not a filmmaker who chose to hide behind his camera). In “Loads” and “Ronnie” (1972), a short that seems to be an outtake from the former film, it is spelled out that he paid the men for their time and is quite unabashed about wanting to keep the memories of their encounters fresh by chronicling the sex they had.

"Ronnie" (1972)

“Loads” and “Ronnie” are indeed eye-openers, but the most moving diary piece on an emotional level is “Confessions” (1971), a short in which McDowell confesses his many indiscretions to the camera as if we, the viewers, are his parents. He provides a laundry list of the things he’s done since his childhood which involve sex and drugs. He then shows us his friends, whom he clearly asked to talk about him. The result is a rather touching self-portrait, since the very un-guilty McDowell seems fine with airing his dirty laundry. (This would be the place to note that Curt sadly died at the young age of 42 from AIDS in 1987.)

While some of the lengthier films have shifts in tone that are jarring, McDowell’s shorts (30 minutes and under) are mostly sublime. One particularly odd format he forged with a friend is represented by two shorts ("A Visit to Indiana," 1970; "Truth for Ruth," 1972) that present 8mm footage with an “audio commentary” of a sort. This commentary consists of Curt discussing what is in the footage (his relatives in Indiana, a woman walking on a beach), while Ted Davis, an eager fellow with a deeper voice and a cavalier, all-American, attitude keeps commenting on what Curt has just said. The juxtaposition is smart and very funny, since it was seemingly meant to put the filmmaker on the defensive and make the interrogator the "auteur" of the project.

"Confessions" (1971)

Poster for "Peed Into
the Wind" (1972)

One of the funnier, longer shorts — with a plot that runs aground, but with some individual sequences that are great — is “Peed Into the Wind” (1972). The film features one of McDowell’s best roles in his own films (he was otherwise used very well by George Kuchar), as “Mick Terrific,” a pompadoured rock star who drives women insane but is actually gay — or is he? One of the film’s funniest scenes finds Mick’s friend challenging him, telling him that he’s “a latent heterosexual.” Mick’s verbal response and subsequent “fight” with the other gent are wonderful, and drive home the silliness of people who try to hide their real orientation.

Mick regrets his decision to “play” queer when he finds out that the girl he loved (sorta) has died. She in fact left him one of her legs as a memento (McDowell’s sense of humor is very much in line with the Kuchars and John Waters).

His last few films, all of them longer, are his most ambitious (for one he even got a grant from the NEA). Thundercrack! is by all measures the best and most audience-pleasing (again, if the audience has a very open mind), but the other two films are equally “epic” for an undergrounder. Chronologically, Sparkle’s Tavern comes after Thundercrack! because it was shot in 1976; McDowell ran out of money to complete it, so it remained unedited and unreleased until the mid-Eighties. The rarest of the films in the Anthology festival (since it exists in only one circulating 16mm print), it is also the biggest mixed bag — comedy and drama, good performances and terrible ones, fantasy scenes taking place in dreamlike spaces and location-shot sequences that are time capsules.

Poster for Sparkle's Tavern

It occurs in its own time and place that resembles, by turns, Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Diggers” films (albeit with no budget and soft-porn content), a Fifties teen-angst melodrama, and a proudly polysexual Seventies underground camp comedy. The film’s plot is characteristically crazy: Beth Sue (Melinda McDowell, Curt’s winsomely cute sister) and Buster (Jerry Terranova) are siblings who run a nightclub/brothel. They keep this a secret from their scarily wholesome mom (Marion Eaton) and are both threatened with blackmail by people who know about their wild sex lives. Into this picture steps a magical figure, Mr. Pupik (George Kuchar), who “liberates” the characters by having them participate in a ritual that opens their minds (and their loins) to the joys of sex. 

Sparkle’s Tavern is incredibly ambitious for a micro-budgeted feature. The character of Beth Sue/Sparkle has two suitors (one of whom has his own plot strand, while another is a nerdy Greek chorus who serves very little purpose in the film but takes up a lot of screen time). There is also a “mystery” cowboy figure who delivers a dramatic monologue near the center of the film — it’s a jarring inclusion, since McDowell’s most effective moments of drama in his other films are his own “confessions.”

Also jarring is the fact that the film starts out on a very funny lurid level and then its sexual content tapers off, in favor of metaphorically sexual moments. For example, one of the best “inventions” in the early nightclub/brothel sequences are sleazy little cubicles called “suck stalls” in which the hostesses give blow jobs to men they never see through glory holes — allowing Buster to substitute for one of them on occasion.

Maron Eaton, Sparkle's Tavern

The film’s golden moments all involve two characters — the mother and Mr. Pupik (which is Yiddish for “belly button”). Marion Eaton proved herself a fearless performer in Thundercrack! playing a sexually greedy voyeur who has a way with a cucumber. Here she is nearly as amazing, albeit as a very inhibited housewife whose sexual awakening as a result of Pupik’s odd ritual is one of the film’s highlights.

George Kuchar in Sparkle's Tavern

Eaton certainly is a camp performer to be reckoned with, but George Kuchar also rates as an “MVP” for his stunningly upbeat and unabashedly manic turn as the jaunty Pupik. I’ve rhapsodized about George before on this blog, but was stunned by how incredibly funny he is in McDowell’s films. He is literally buoyant, stealing every scene he’s in. The only person who matches his energy is Eaton, who serves as his foil in Sparkle as he explains his philosophy of life in a series of rhyming dialogues that are often sung (he accompanies himself with a saxophone and a tambourine!).

George played romantic leads in his own films and in those of his brother Mike, but McDowell gave him the “hero” roles he always wanted. He was always a compulsively watchable performer (the reason his meandering “weather diaries” are so entertaining). Camp is balanced with sincerity every time George is onscreen, and he truly was the standout performer in all of the McDowell films shown in the retro (Eaton and the very attractive and intense Ainslie Pryor were close seconds).

Melinda McDowell Milks spoke after the screening of Sparkle, discussing the ways in which the plot points that involved parental acceptance of sexual behavior were indeed a sort of wish fulfillment on Curt’s part — his parents knew he was gay and accepted his lifestyle, but did not want to talk to people in their Indiana hometown about Curt's sexuality.

She also discussed the making of the film, revealing that all the sets — which included the nightclub, some very detailed and realistic bedrooms, and a kitchen — were constructed by Curt and friends in the nine months in which Curt and Melinda lived in the bathroom/kitchen-less space in which the film was shot (the same space in which “Loads” was filmed).

The other longer work, Taboo (the Single and the LP) (1981), is the most feverish of McDowell’s films. He juggles several “strands,” all of them centered around sentences of graffiti on a wall. The film is rife with flashcuts and quick swerves, between characters, situations, and a real-life portrait of one of Curt’s friends (who recounts his sex life with his girlfriend, at the filmmaker’s request).

*****

McDowell had a penchant for being involved in every aspect of his filmmaking, from scripting, camerawork, and editing to set design, costumes, animation, and the musical score. He started out as a painter — his disturbing and haunting portrait of the Beatles is to the right.

It’s no surprise then that the most entertaining films included in the retro were his “mini-musical” shorts. The films are actually operettas, with the characters singing their dialogue or speaking rhyming text. The “handmade” aspect of these films comes across in the fact that Curt’s friends couldn’t really carry a tune (except for Ainslie Pryor, who is seen here singing on TV several years later). The singing was also done live on-set, accompanied by what sounds like a piano being played out of frame.

Ainslie Pryor in "Boggy Depot" (1973)

Short “trailers” in which McDowell’s actresses sang their welcomes to patrons of San Francisco’s Roxy Theater and hyped the weekend midnight shows were placed at the beginning of each Anthology program. “Boggy Depot” (1973) and “The Mean Brothers Get Stood Up” (also ‘73) found Curt and his costar (and frequent collaborator) Mark Ellinger tormenting other characters (the former) or singing about how they’d like to kill people (the latter).

"A Night with Gilda Peck” (also ’73) is a deranged meller in which a criminal (George Kuchar) breaks into the house of a haughty (and extremely tacky) woman (the actress billed as “Mrs. Kathleen Hohalek”) in an attempt to rape and rob her, with musical merriment ensuing when all the characters enter her bedroom and feud among themselves while singing.

The poster for "Weiners and Buns Musical"

“Weiners and Buns Musical” (1972) was the piece de resistance of the musicals in the retrospective (which will, according to the Anthology programmers, conclude later in the year). Absolute camp perfection, the film finds a housewife (a very prim Ainslie Pryor) and her businessman husband (a quite debonair, made-up George Kuchar), singing about the death of their young son and cheating on each other with the same man, a sailor (Curt, in his swabby finest).

Over a dinner of the titular comestibles the three leads decide to continue their affairs as a threesome — while Curt apologizes for having murdered their little boy (who no one cared about, anyway). Sheer bliss, and another reason one hopes that more of McDowell’s work — and some of George Kuchar’s (237 films and videos, and not a one available legally!) — is released on DVD soon. 

Note: Some of the images above are from online postings by Melinda McDowell Milks; their copyright is owned by the Curt McDowell estate.

Review: 'The George Kuchar Reader'

George Kuchar was a very funny writer. His movie scripts reflected this, as did his self-penned capsule descriptions of his films and videos. The book he wrote with his twin brother Mike, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (now sadly out of print), is a “sideways” memoir that has some wonderful passages. The newly released book The George Kuchar Reader focuses squarely on his “lurid” writing and is loaded with wonderful diversions. Its last section also provides what may be our only insight into the real George that hid behind his outsized public persona.

Edited by Andrew Lampert and published by Primary Information, the Reader is a cornucopia of writings by George, including letters, diaries, articles, movie program notes, speeches, drawings, comics (from the period where his work was appearing in collections edited by his “Frisco” friend Art Spiegelman), syllabuses and, most importantly, very useful short essays he wrote on making films and videos on an extremely low budget.

The book is a great supplement to George’s film and video work, which is sadly not available at all on DVD — selected shorts can be found “underground” (the Torrents) and above-ground (YouTube) on the Net. When I wrote about George's death, I included a list of indispensable embeds of Kuchar films available at that time — the material goes up and it goes down, so different titles are available at different times.

The only feature film related to the work of George and his twin brother (and one-time collaborator) Mike is Jennifer Kroot’s delightful documentary It Came From Kuchar, which is now legally available on YT:

Back to the Reader: George’s prose style was intentionally torrid, since he clearly loved Hollywood fan magazines and the popular press. He loved describing his films in the most lewd and lurid terms imaginable and putting himself down (usually invoking gas — he was quite possibly the filmmaker most aware of his body functions).

He rhapsodizes in one piece about his “defining filmic moment” seeing Vera Hruba Ralston and David Brian in a terrible B-feature released by Republic. The cheapness of the film inspired him to believe that he could make films in a similar vein:

“Here were truly crazy people worth emulating because it made growing up seem like fun: you can be in your fifties and still play-act, have fake fist fights and tumble on the floor with robust Czechoslovakians. These were my kind of people from an exotic tribe that I wanted to infiltrate… The human imagination imagining the best way to make the worst look good. This became a defining film moment for me.”

As noted, a few of the most valuable pieces find George offering lighting tips for low-budget film- and videomakers. As opposed to, say, Jerry Lewis, whose book The Total Filmmaker tells a fledgling filmmaker how to make a big-budget production with a giant crew and studio backing, George and Mike Kuchar have always spoken in lectures and writings about the importance of bringing extension cords and gaffer tape (or duck tape) to a shoot, finding the right bulbs, the best places to place your lights, and the fact that a regular clamp-lamp found in a hardware store is as good as (and cheaper than) a lamp purchased in a photography store.

George’s tips are of course delivered with a humorous undertone, but you can tell they came from his own past mistakes: “You can also use a sheer, black cloth to soften the image, but be careful when you put it on the lens with a rubber band that the excess portion doesn’t rub against the microphone and create back-ground sounds that would suggest a potential skin chafing outbreak.”

George also wrote what could be called, for lack of a better term, “historical pieces.” One hand-written six-page entry (and may I say that George’s handwriting is totally legible — those nuns did a good job with him!) finds him describing the underground film scene of the Sixties. He of course punctuates the piece with a number of humorous observations, but he also is providing us with a glimpse into a long-gone world that he and Mike were an important part of. At one point he talks about the different kinds of films one could see at underground screenings.

“Long pictures were made with really lengthy, single takes. After a few minutes the audience would catch on to what was in store for them…. and sometime rebel in a violent manner. Other folks would sit back and flow with the experience… the aesthetic of boredom, kindling erotic fantasies involving other members of the audience sitting nearby.”

As put together by Lampert, the book emphasizes George’s opinions about his work, the shooting and editing processes (which he saw as both work and a leisure-time activity), and his reflections on the movies and popular culture. All of this material is incredibly funny, and yet one wonders what George was like when he wasn’t manifesting his George “persona,” as seen in his diary videos and in these writings.

The real George emerges in the final segment of the Reader, a touching sampling of excerpts from his letters and emails to his close friend — and one-time Kuchar brothers screen goddess! — Donna Kerness. This correspondence allows us access to George’s real thoughts and emotions in his final year, as he battled prostate cancer yet continued teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute and compulsively producing his charming and funny video diaries.

Although he loved to put himself down in his public work, these personal emails find George quite proud of his accomplishments as an underground and independent filmmaker (and teacher). He is also revealed here to be an incurable romantic, who pined heavily for a younger man with whom he had a nearly two-decade relationship; the relationship was a purely sexual one for the other man (with a dollop of friendship), while George awaited each call and communication from the gent with bated breath.

He notes at one point that “….I’ve always been in the shadows regarding this aspect of my life while others have openly flaunted and reveled in their couplings. I no longer feel like being this perceived wallflower or backseat passenger on the road to romance.” He prized his position as the man’s “fuck buddie” (as George spells it — Lampert has left his writing as is, so grammar and spelling mistakes aren’t corrected, to keep with the "lurid" flavor of George’s prose style).

At times the emails read just like any personal correspondence. At other times George does indeed ponder his mortality and the films and videos he feverishly made throughout his life: “So much [of the current situation] is trying to extinguish the magic with tricks of the mind and ticks of the clock. Mortality itself is attempting to blow out the blaze. Those are the culprits who have set my teeth chattering with these monologues of doom and gloom…. I don’t want the fire to die. I can die but not the flame. It has to keep dancing to create all those shadows on the wall moving. Those shadows are what my life has left others to view.”

The 65 pages of correspondence to Kerness (49 pages from his final year) serve as the memoir that George never wrote. Those of us who never knew the man personally but loved his films will find the “real George” as endearing (and libidinous!) as his public self. Those of us who have had health, romance, and/or artistic problems similar to the ones that he went through can’t help but think of him as a sort of “patron saint” (especially for ex-Catholics — although I notice his emails indicate that he still prayed nightly).

But of course, most of the Reader is filled not with George’s own deepest emotions, but with his love of cinema, as in this intro to a piece about making a very prone-to-nudity senior “actress,” Linda Martinez, into a “sex symbol” in his student films: “It is all fantasy. A world of illusion conjured up by concubines with cold sores that masquerade as beauty marks…. Pancake makeup replaces the naturally pancake-induced cellulite that ripples on the buttocks of non-actors and these powder-puffed butts that are no longer silent either. They utter digitally enhanced retorts to the dialogue that ricochets around the theatre in Dolby stereo. Technology has amplified the aural components of every vibrating orifice into a Jehovah-like commandment of withering import.

“We are a truly blessed congregation of cinephiles in nature.”

Any artist who called his work “gossamer garbage” surely knew that “high” and “low” culture are very integrally related. This fine book reminds us of how important George truly was, and is, to the film community. Now let’s get some of his films (and Mike’s too) on DVD soon! 

NOTE: Donna Kerness maintains a site for her art. It can be found here.

Catchy, beautiful, and very unusual music for Xmas Eve

It's everywhere this time of year – Christmas music that is. As I write this, only 24 hours remain until the holiday is here and then it's GONE, so I will get straight to the point – if you are looking for non-brain-damaged, unfamiliar Yuletide- (and Solstice-)themed music, songs with a brain, a heart, and in many cases, a “demented” soul, look no further than the following four recommendations.

First of all, there is the sublimely strange melange of music served up by the DJ known as KBC on his “Bitslap” podcast. His themed episodes are all wonderful, but one of his specialties is uncovering VERY rare and often uniquely oddball Xmas music. So feast on the offerings available on his podcast, found here. As of today he has four current Xmas shows and a number of items from years past.

Now we move on to the music-videos of three tunes I really do love, for different reasons. The first is a non-mawkish but beautifully sentimental item composed and performed by the Australian musical comedian Tim Minchin. Tim is an atheist whose Xmas tune celebrates the holiday from a secular perspective, arguing that the real crux of the season is being with family and friends. It's a smart and sweet tune.

On to the seasonal cheer. I've written a few times before on this blog about Sherwin Sleeves, the brainchild of writer-performer Sean Hurley. Sherwin is a man of many talents and a sublimely gravely voice. That voice has been featured in two very wonderful Xmas stories, the first being “The Christmas Skater,” a beautifully written piece of radio that can be heard here.

The second seasonal adventure is one that I have just listened to today for the first time. It is the innovative, award-winning play Whisper, Pray, Make Room, which finds Sean as a modern-day Scrooge who happens to work as a talk-radio host. The "ghosts" reach him in the voice of his callers. As I've noted before on these pages, Hurley is a really top-notch writer whose works are true Internet treasures. Check out his terrific "radio theater" stories with Sleeves at his Atoms, Motion and the Void site.

Oh, and here is Sleeves' extremely catchy Xmas tune, which appears at the end of Whisper... (but was written before the play was created). It's short and is worthy of repeat plays.

And finally a song that belongs not to Xmas, but to the original holiday that occurred around this time of year, the Solstice. Singer-songwriter Andy Ditzler's tune is a wonderful earworm with a chorus that's catchy as hell. The reason I recommend it heartily is not only that the song is upbeat and joyous, but because Ditzler was lucky enough to have an underground legend, Funhouse favorite George Kuchar, shoot his music-video.

Funhouse viewers and readers of this blog will know that I LOVE George's work (and that of his brother Mike), and this music-vid (shot while George was teaching at the San Franciso Art Institute) has some imagery that only he could've come up with. Santa, dinosaurs, and Halloween decorations – the nine-year-old in me cheers.

Speaking of those of other faiths, if you'd like to hear three novelty Xmas items recorded by Jewish comics (Jerry Lewis, Marty Feldman, and Albert Brooks), then check out my Xmas-music entry from last year.

A short lesson in filmmaking from George Kuchar

To follow up on my last post, I thought I would offer up two pages from the way-out-of-print autobiography by the Kuchar brothers, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (1997). I realized that my Deceased Artiste tribute didn’t mention George’s facility for language — his notes for the Kuchar screenings were always wonderfully, wildly written, in a kind of hyperventilating sleazy paperback prose that was a joy to read.

Thus, I offer only two pages from this OOP classic (if the copyright holders, whoever they be, wish them removed from the Net, all they need to do is contact me — it will be done). In the meantime, I picked these two pages because they are the close of a particularly useful chapter wherein George offers his rules for filmmaking. The passage I wanted to share starts with the italicized text on the first page.

He was both a lurid writer (”You will be beneath contempt and can therefore work unimpeded in the lower depths while the self-inflated egos of Eros and Ektachrome drift above the surface of mortal existence, dangling their poisonous tentacles in your direction.”) and one who taught well and simply (“Learn what wires go where and why!”). So take a lesson from a master on how to craft your own “gossamer garbage.” (Stating the obvious, instruction-wise: Click the image to enlarge it, save it, and then zoom in to read with whatever image viewer you use.)

Color Him Lurid: Deceased Artiste George Kuchar

George Kuchar never, ever sold out. In fact, like any good and true underground filmmaker (and George and his twin brother Mike were making narrative 8mm movies before that term ever existed), George wouldn’t’ve known how to sell out, even if he’d been offered the additional dough. His films and videos were homemade productions from the first to the last, and they had more identity, authenticity, emotion, thought, and, yes, pure insanity, than anything the major studios would ever, and will ever, put out.

George died this week at the age of 69, and his death greatly saddened both those who knew him personally and those like myself who felt they knew him well from hours spent viewing his voluminous “diary” videos. I had one cordial encounter in person with the gentleman, at a gallery exhibit of his work last year, and, in response to my pitch for an interview for the Funhouse TV show, he not only wrote an extremely polite e-mail a day or two later, explaining he had no spare time during a short trip to NYC, but also left an equally polite and friendly voicemail saying he’d be back this way soon and we’d talk then, and “look me up if you ever get to Frisco — I’m in the book!”

George’s politeness surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. After I interviewed his brother Mike, I got the nicest single note I’ve ever received from a Funhouse guest. Meeting them confirmed that both brothers' films and videos were indeed 100% genuine. Given their friendliness, the newcomer might've thought that the brothers — yes, they are twins and have the same speaking voice, and fucking awesome Nu Yawk accent — are naïve, silly dreamers who just happened to acquire a reputation because their 8mm and 16mm films were liked by the right people at the right time.

Actually, after watching even a few of the brothers’ joint and solo works, one can easily see that while the gentlemen are extremely polite, they also knew exactly what they were after onscreen. I’ve been told of how George videotaped you while you videotaped him — much like I get the sense that Mike is constantly conjuring visions in his head as he’s talking to you (during our interview, his eyes were often closed when he was intent on making a point).

As young men, both brothers developed into addictive “imagists” (my phrase, not theirs) for whom everything they saw and experienced was grist for the mill; thus, the very personal nature of what they were doing. Sure, George’s projects with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute are completely “out there” (that’s an expression whose time has come and gone), and seem on first glance to be just fun filmmaking games for his classes.

However, those films and videos, while not being near his video diaries and his solo 16mm and mini-DV work in terms of brilliance, still have their moments, as can be seen in the video “Butterball.” The video can’t be embedded on this blog because, in the 2000s, George was still doing what he did with Mike back in the late Fifties and early Sixties — using “found music” for his soundtracks (read: breaking out CDs from his own collection or that of a friend). Included here are different versions of the old song “My Love Has Two Faces,” and instrumental versions of a song by the Police and what I *think* is “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?”

To salute George I want to move backwards in this post through the films of his that are online; those unfamiliar with George’s work should jump right down to the two modern classics linked to at the bottom, or check out the commercially available documentary It Came From Kuchar, made by one of George’s former students, Jennifer Kroot.

Since, for the most part, both brothers’ films and videos (Mike has made dozens and dozens; George easily made a few hundred in total) aren’t available anywhere online or on DVD, the documentary serves as a good “101” for those who want to be exposed to the wonderful world of Kuchar.



In terms of official releases of Kuchar pics, there have been only two in the 35 years that home-entertainment media have existed: the British VHS of four shorts by George called Color Me Lurid (the contents of which can be found in various places on the Net), and the DVD of three 16mm shorts by Mike entitled Sins of the Fleshopoids, which also keeps surfacing on YT.

New Yorkers have been very lucky, in that the chief curator of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, David Schwartz, is an unabashed admirer of underground cinema and has programmed entire festivals of it (my first major dose of George and Mike’s work was ingested out at the MMI).

Also, the city’s most important repertory theater, the Anthology Film Archives, has presented new and vintage works by the Kuchars every few months, allowing NYC residents to be introduced to their work, as well as that of nearly every significant filmmaker from the silent era on, at the lowest prices in Manhattan (!). The AFA is the only NYC theater brave enough to show the uncut and still surprisingly shocking Thundercrack! (above), scripted by and starring George, since the heyday of rep back in the Seventies and Eighties.

The reasons that the Kuchars’ work hasn’t surfaced on DVD are many: lack of “consumer interest” (read: mainstream appeal for idiots); music clearance rights (particularly important for the early, jointly made 8mm films that are awash in cuts from old singles and LPs); and, perhaps most importantly, an evident lack of interest from the brothers themselves.

Let’s face it, to be an independent filmmaker these days requires an inordinate amount of self-promotion and the selling of one’s work, something the Kuchars have never done (to their own credit). One of the most notable fan/students of the Kuchar brothers’ work, John Waters, has turned himself into a very familiar brand, both as a filmmaker and as a media celebrity, lecturer/standup, and talk show guest. I was in fact introduced to the Kuchars’ style of filmmaking through my discovery of the wonderful early Waters features. Waters admirably is always very forthright about crediting the brothers for influencing his work — although (grumble!) his list of important indie filmmakers in Cecil B. Demented included such non-Kucharian, non-Kenneth Angered, folks as Otto Preminger and Spike Lee!

The thing that the Kuchars gave to Waters, Rosa von Praunheim, Guy Maddin, and a very LONG list of other micro-budgeted filmmakers, was a blissful sense of kitsch and camp that melded the melodrama of mainstream Hollywood with the “otherness” of low-budget sci-fi and thriller movies. What first strikes you upon watching the Kuchars' movies and videos is the insanely bright and eye-catching color schemes they used (drawn from both Technicolor melodramas and the comic books they read as kids).

In the last twenty years, as they both have edited their mini-DV productions using digital effects, they have duplicated that color scheme in an even trippier fashion. Some might see this as a “sell-out” of one kind or another, but the brothers’ works have still been made with nearly non-existent budgets (even the videos made for George’s classes were done on a very thin shoestring), and the effects that they’ve used are in fact from earlier generations of computer-editing programs (as well as completely offline digital editing boards) and, most importantly, are being used by older men with the same kind of joy and inventiveness with which they used 8mm back in the late Fifties.

Before I discuss the clips that are online, let me add one aspect: the fact that both gentlemen have resided in San Francisco now for years (George moved there in the mid-1970s), but retained their spectacular NYC accents. Born and raised in the Bronx, they have been celebrated all over the world, but when they talk, the cityspeak pours out of their mouths. I loved hearing Mike rhapsodize about the movies the brothers loved when they were young, and I never tire of George musing on literally everything and anything in his video diaries.

I myself don’t really care about the weather one way or the other (unless I’m caught without an umbrella). Listening to George go on and on about storms and natural catastrophes, as well as the “men in black” and Bigfoot and other paranormal phenomena, was riveting, though. Samples of George talking at length about his pictures can be found here and here.

And what are we left with then, from George’s prodigious output and groundbreaking work with NO goddamned budgets? A sense that anything is indeed possible on film and video, and the fact that the man possessed a very sharp, funny, and ridiculous sense of humor. George and Mike belong on any short list of great underground filmmakers — a Mount Rushmore containing Anger, Deren, Brakhage, Mekas, Jacobs, Markopoulos, Snow, and oh yeah, I guess that Warhol guy and his crew.

What distinguished them from their colleagues was that their movies were always so much fun to watch. The images were just as radical and jarring as those found in the work of the other pioneers, but their sense of humor— and brilliant ability to craft an alternate world out of household objects found in NYC and San Francisco apartments — was always a constant.

Watching a multiplex movie may give you that Spielbergian emotional “tug” or a quick laugh at a fart joke (and yes, in the Sixties the Kuchar brothers were the ones who delivered the very first bad-taste moments onscreen, inspiring young Waters). But the Kuchars’ movies and videos convince you that it can all be done with no budget, and done very beautifully at that.

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Moving backward in time through George’s work, I’ll first mention that you can watch one of the films made with his SF Art Institute students here. It is called “Dynasty of Depravity” — has it taken me this long to mention what an unmitigated delight the titles of the Kuchar movies are? When you start out with “I Was a Teenage Rumpot,” it’s hard get better, but they did, on an annual basis.

George also used to diarize his meetings with people he thought were interesting. Examples of that kind of video can be found here and also here (the latter starring Christopher Coppola in the home of his brother Nicholas Cage).

These are only recommended for those who’ve seen George’s best works, but if you need an idea of what that type of production looks like, here is a very joyful micro-budgeted (toys, Egyptian gods, Santa, and dinosaurs!) music video for a song by Andy Ditzler celebrating the winter solstice, directed by George (much like Kenneth Anger, the Kuchars were unintentionally designing “music videos” in their work from the very beginning):



The Kuchars had a beloved dog that figured heavily in their films when a pet was needed (he is the pooch taking a very scary crap in Mike’s The Craven Sluck; see below). George did a filmic ode to the dog with his The Mongreloid in 1978:



As noted above, George was obsessed by extreme weather and would travel to a small city in Oklahoma on an annual basis to record their rainy season. One of his “weather diaries” can be found on the Ubuweb site (they of the seemingly bottomless bandwidth — how DO they do it, and how can *I* do it?). For a nice impressionistic view of his obsession with weather, go no further than this pretty and strange piece called Wild Night in El Reno from 1977:



Certainly the strangest item from George that can be found online is I, An Actress (1977). Intended as a demo reel for an aspiring young actress, instead it becomes a chance to watch George coach her in how to overact for the camera (he was a master at assuming the melodramatic “mood” and stealing a scene). I’m assuming she never submitted it as her “reel” at auditions:



One of the Kuchar features I’ve never seen but would love to is The Devil’s Cleavage from 1975. Some generous poster has put up a party scene from the film. It demonstrates George’s facility with “found music,” especially odd items like a track from the late and "incredibly strange" Mrs. Miller:



The strangest-ever film that George was involved in was one he didn’t direct. Thundercrack! was directed by his friend and protégé Curt McDowell in 1975, and it is still a surprisingly “shocking” movie for many viewers, in that its mega-melodramatic action stops every so often for a graphic sexual interlude (guy/girl, girl/girl, guy/guy).

George wrote the wonderfully overwrought dialogue (it really provides a great lesson in how to mock the melodramatic dialogue found in old Hollywood films, and even in contemporary television dramas), and stars as the circus trainer of a gorilla who is getting far too close to his charge. A helpful YT poster has attempted to upload most of the movie’s non-sex sequences (which is more than half the film), but I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a far weirder picture with those scenes intact:



Although George produced video diaries on a regular basis in the last three decades, he rarely talked about his personal relationships on-camera; thus, there not many direct references to his being gay in the films and videos.

His film Pagan Rhapsody (1970) contains a gay seduction scene, though, and the wonderful inclusion of the Zombies’ “Care of Cell 44” on the soundtrack (go to 14:45; the film is already wonderful, but the Zombies tune, one of their best, BRIGHTENS the pic incredibly). The interesting thing about the way that George and Mike used pop music was that they used *snippets* of songs, rather than playing the whole thing, as with Kenneth Anger or John Waters. As a result you have that snippet bouncing around your head for days, and can’t forget the images attached to it:



Speaking of Mike, here’s one of his 16mm features, The Craven Sluck (1967). George gives a great performance as a seducer who lures away the married Floraine Connors:



George beautifully established his filmmaking style in the mid-Sixties, as did Mike — definitely a function of their splitting up as collaborators and each embarking on his own directorial path. Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967) is pure, undiluted George K: torrid melodrama, Catholic guilt, wonderfully over-the-top performances by Kuchar family friends, gay longing, amazing apartment-dweller kitsch, and sublime use of “found music” [RECOMMENDED]:



I close out with one of George’s first solo 16mm features, the utterly, utterly sublime Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966). There is too much I could write about this film, but suffice it to say it’s brilliant on several levels:
—as a record of a filmmaker salvaging a project that went into the crapper (his lead actress bailed during filming);
—as a beautiful combination of the overwrought and the touching in George’s work;
—as a wonderful bird’s-eye-view of apartment life in the NYC in the Sixties;
—as the film that in my mind has the series of cuts (go to 7:40!) that inspired the opening of the credit sequence in Scorsese’s Mean Streets. (Scorsese’s Film Foundation has restored the early 8mms made by George and Mike.) George may not have seemed in his diary videos like the kind of guy who could rock out, but check out his use of rock music in his films, and, I’m telling you, you’re seeing the blueprint for how it was used by those who followed. I could watch that Four Seasons moment in Hold Me… over and over again. And have. [HEAVILY RECOMMENDED]:



You should see as many of George’s movies and videos as you can, but his mid-Sixties work, particularly Hold Me… explains why, in fourteen quick and crazy minutes, he will never be forgotten.