Rialto Theatre to Host Found Footage Festival

June, 05, 2011 , by Stacey

This week, the Found Footage Festival makes a tour stop here in Raleigh at the Rialto Theatre. The festival, which has come through our fair town several times in the past and has sold out venues across the U.S. and Canada, is a unique tour in that it presents to the audience unusual and entertaining discarded video footage found by the curators . In addition to the clips featured on this tour, the festival will also be screening the 25^th anniversary copy of the music documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot.

Nick Preuher and Joe Picket are the curators and hosts of the FFF, and appear in-person at each tour stop to provide their own personal commentary and to answer questions. Prueher is a former researcher for David Letterman’s Late Show, and Pickett is a writer and director. The two have written for The Onion and Entertainment Weekly, as well as having directed the award winning film Dirty Country. They began collecting VHS tapes they discovered in the early 1990s, after stumbling across a training video at a McDonald’s in Wisconsin. Ever since then, the two have amassed an impressive collection of films picked up everywhere from garage sales to warehouses to dumpsters across the country. This eventually led to the creation of the Found Footage Festival in 2004. The festival has been featured on NPR and Jimmy Kimmel Live, has garnered critical acclaim from publications across the country, and was influential in the success of the recent documentary Winnebego Man.

Clips featured in the Volume 5 program include such gems as self-hypnosis videos about how to be a better lover, businessman, and bowler; a home video from 1986 detailing a debaucherous weekend in Florida; instructional ventriloquism videos (which the press release promises “will forever haunt you”); and an exercise compilation video featuring some recognizable stars.

Preceding the found clips, Preuher and Picket will be showcasing the legendary music documentary, Heavy Metal Parking Lot:

Called one of the "greatest rock movies of ever" by Cameron Crowe, "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" will receive a rare theatrical screening at the Found Footage Festival in honor of its 25th anniversary. Videotaped in a concert arena parking lot before a Judas Priest show in Maryland in 1986, the short documentary began as bootlegged videotape but has since been hailed as an anthropological masterpiece by USA Today, SPIN, VH1, GQ, and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters. For more information about the film and directors John Heyn and Jeff Krulik, visit www.heavymetalparkinglot.com.

Co-curator Nick Prueher was kind enough to answer a few questions for us at New Raleigh about his upcoming tour stop with the Found Footage Festival.

NR: Why have you chosen Heavy Metal Parking lot to accompany the found footage this year?

Nick Prueher: Though not technically "found," Heavy Metal Parking Lot was a big part of our early video collection in the mid-'90s. It was very much a part of the tape trading tradition that we were a part of. Before the internet and our show, the way you'd share videos with people is by making poor quality dubs and trading them. We got a really lousy eighth generation dub of "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" from a friend who was in a band and fell in love with the video. Basically, these two guys who worked at a public access TV station took a camera and a mic out to the parking lot of a Judas Priest concert in 1986 and captured the scene and the people. It's a perfect 15-minute time capsule of that time and place and, having gotten to know the guys who shot it, we thought it'd be fun to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie by showing it on the big screen to open our shows.

NR: What can people expect to see at the FFF?

NP: People are going to see stuff they've never seen before. Training videos, exercise videos, home movies, self-hypnosis tapes, ventriloquism how-to videos, and a video called "Rent-A-Friend" that needs to be seen to be believed. Plus, there's full frontal male nudity. That ought to sell some tickets.

NR: Where are some of the more unusual places you've found these videos?

NP: We've always got our eyes peeled in out of the way places for VHS tapes. One time I was taking down the trash in my apartment building and found a dusty stack of videos in the Dumpster, so I climbed in and picked out one that was hand-labeled in pencil as "Bonion Sergery." The guy had managed to spell both "bunion" and "surgery" wrong. Another time, a couple of years ago, we went to an estate sale in Queens, New York and bought an old VHS camcorder for five dollars. When we got it back home and plugged it in, we found a half-recorded tape still inside. It turned out to be a home movie of this old man - presumably the one who had died - wearing a dress and dancing to the "Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack. You just never know what you're going to turn and where you're going to find it.

NR: Have any owners ever approached you to reclaim their films?

NP: We always try to track down the people in the videos to get the backstory of how things came about, so when we get to meet the stars of the footage it's a real highlight. Most recently, we met the guy behind the "Rent-A-Friend" video we'll be showing in Raleigh. His idea back in 1986 was to make a video friend for lonely people with VCRs, and it's just as disturbing as it sounds. We had a million questions for this guy and he enthusiastically answered them all, so all your burning "Rent-A-Friend" questions will be answered at the Rialto Theatre.

The Found Footage Festival will take place at the Rialto Theatre this Wednesday, June 8^th, beginning at 8pm. It’s sure to be a hilarious and uniquely entertaining event not to be missed. Prueher has also invited the public to bring in any promising videos they might have from their own collection. "We love hearing the stories of how things were found and we'd love to have Raleigh represented in the show the next time we come through town." Tickets are $10 and are available at www.foundfootagefest.com.