Crap-buster video

How do you fund a documentary about a foul-mouthed country singer known only to truck drivers? If you're Queens-based filmmakers Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, you raid your extensive collection of unintentionally hilarious videos, put together a touring comedy show, and slowly build a cult following. The Found Footage Festival, started three years ago as a showcase for the corporate training videos, dubbed public-access TV shows, and bad '80s exercise tapes accumulated by Pickett and Prueher since their high school days in southern Wisconsin, was successful enough to fund the completion of Dirty Country, a doc about truck-stop tape legend Larry Pierce that recently won an audience award at its South By Southwest debut. The festival also landed Pickett and Prueher a CBS development deal to turn their snarky teenage hobby into a major network show. Back in Chicago with a new pile of videos, the Found Footage guys told The A.V. Club where they find their videos, how they compete with YouTube, and why they love their stupid, stupid tapes.

The A.V. Club: The last time the Found Footage Festival played here, you had video of an inflatable penis. Any inflatable privates this time around?
Joe Pickett: One thing we promise at every Found Footage show is full-frontal male nudity. It's usually brief and non-erotic, but that's the Found Footage guarantee.
AVC: Found Footage Vol. 1 was made up of videos you guys had collected since high school. Where do the new videos come from?
Nick Prueher: A lot of videos came from us touring around; we'd go to Alaska or Seattle or Los Angeles and we'd comb the thrift stores there. We ended up finding a lot of great tapes in our travels. The other thing that happened was people were inspired to bring their tapes to the shows. So the new show is a mixture of things we found in thrift stores while touring and things people have given us.
JP: We also had some stuff on the back burner that we really wanted to include in the first show, like a video called "Rap Montage"—we have so many attempts at hip-hop on video that we finally put together a montage.
AVC: Many Found Footage videos come from the '80s and early '90s, which was the golden age of video. Now that the DVD format has taken over and technology has improved, is it tougher to find crappy videos?
JP: Visually it has improved but the content is still stupid. We just recently got a DVD about how to impersonate Elvis. It was made maybe three years ago. I think we're going to see a lot more of that because video is cheap to produce. Everybody knows how to work a video camera. And because the format has changed, a lot of people bring their videotapes to Goodwill and sell them at garage sales. Man, it's just been a treasure trove lately. Home movies sneak in there and everything. We did a show up in Anchorage, Alaska, recently, and thrift stores up there are untapped, not picked over at all. We had to check extra luggage because we bought so many videos from this thrift store. There was a Blockbuster training video, something called Mom And Grandma's Birthday, a Siegfried And Roy cartoon.
NP: We haven't even watched that one yet.
AVC: How do you compete with YouTube?
NP: YouTube is great. There's tons of stuff on there. There's seemingly no end to stupid people hurting themselves. But for us, it's apples and oranges. It's one thing to be forwarded a video you watch, laugh at, and forget about. But we've found these videos personally, we have an attachment to them, we really cherish these videos. We're sort of tour guides through the world of our found video collection. There are so many weird videos out there that you need someone to take you through it.
AVC: You guys have affection for the videos, but you're still making fun of the people involved. Do you worry about crossing the line from affectionate ribbing to cruel mockery?
NP: For me, anyway, I have no scruples whatsoever. So I have no problem with that.
JP: We're not assholes about it. We're not like, "Look at this douchebag!" We make fun of ourselves just as much as we make fun of people in the videos. Now you see William Shatner making fun of himself on commercials. On Dancing With the Stars, Billy Ray Cyrus recently did a song about his mullet. These people are aware of these things and are willing to laugh at it as long as they can be in the spotlight.