In the trailer for the 2008 Found Footage Festival, against the aural backdrop of retro synthesizers, we see clips of a middle-aged woman stroking a stuffed animal, a stars-and-stripes clad Hulk Hogan shredding on a guitar, men platonically bathing together, and leotards. Lots of leotards.
Nick Prueher, cofounder of the festival, had been working at a Wisconsin McDonald’s for two years in 1991 when his friend began training to become manager. In order to be certified, he was obligated to view thirty different videos ““ one of which was entitled “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties.”
“He was going batty from watching all these videos,” Prueher said. “And he pulled me in and said, “˜You gotta see this one.’ It was so ridiculous and insulting and dumb. … So I swiped it.”
Prueher brought the video home and, along with friend and future codirector of the festival Joe Pickett, showed it to all his high school friends with a running commentary to add to its entertainment value.
But the fact that such a strange video was found in the first place spurred the thought that far weirder videos surely existed across America.
Prueher and Pickett started scouring Goodwill stores, yard sales, thrift stores and break rooms across the country, excavating videos and film footage from decades past, including more job training scenarios, music videos, clips from public access television, and much more. The YouTube tags on the trailer for the second volume of a Found Footage Festival DVD include: chicken, exercise, harvester and stairway.
“Friends would come over in college, and here in New York we’d have people come over to watch the videos we found and entertain our friends,” Prueher said. “We decided we could take it out of the living room and put it in a movie theater.”
Now, the private screenings have formalized and expanded to entertain a nationwide audience, such as that of West Hollywood’s M Bar and Restaurant on Friday. The new 2008 program, which will make its debut Friday, follows the heels of the vastly successful programs of recent years past as the festival has hosted many sell-out shows across the country since its 2004 tour.
The success of the festival came as a surprise to its founders, but Prueher thinks there is a certain appeal to these discovered videos that many find hilariously intriguing and slightly voyeuristic.
“Part of it is that these videos were not meant to be seen in public,” Prueher said. “Maybe in a break room or a living room VCR. There’s something about putting them in the context of a room of 300 people who recognize how goofy they are.”
But in an age when any tween goofball can post his attempts at being funny on YouTube, there is a certain criteria in selecting what clips actually make it to the festival ““ the main one being that the video has to be found somewhere “physically, with a story behind it,” Prueher said. “It’s less disposable that way.”
The video also must be unintentionally funny, like a public access cooking show or basically anything from the 1980s.
“We’re mostly interested in movies done by people with a lot of ambition and not a lot of talent,” Prueher said.
The format of the Found Footage Festival is more comedy show than Cannes; Prueher and Pickett introduce each video by giving background info into the place where it was found and making “smart-ass remarks,” as Prueher puts it, during the video excerpts. In some cases, professional comics come on stage for cameo bits, and in one upcoming show in West Hollywood, actor Chris Elliot will make an appearance.
The real stars of the festival, though, are the videos themselves. A highlight of this year’s show comes in a collection of several videos titled “Hunks,” with the montage’s centerpiece featuring two regional professional wrestlers from ’80s Memphis called “The Fabulous Ones.”
“They’re these two hunky ’80s guys with beards and tight-fitting clothing, and this was the video they’d play as they were coming out to wrestle,” Prueher said. “It shows them in a bathtub drinking wine. … It’s the most ridiculous homoerotic video I’ve ever seen.”
Prueher, who now works for “The Colbert Report” in addition to running the Found Footage Festival, encourages people to share videos that they themselves may have discovered, contributing their own Holy Grails of Weird.
“It makes our job a lot easier,” he said.