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| Mike, in a photo from the @kucharbrothers Instagram. |
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 of 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 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 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.
