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AMERICAN
MOVIE
7/10
US
1999
dir. & cin. Chris Smith
documentary
104 minutes
Although American
Movie is a well-made, entertaining documentary in its own right, it’s
illuminating to view it as a late footnote to the Blair Witch phenomenon.
In an article on Utah’s Sundance Film Festival in the April ’99 issue
of Premiere magazine, Christine Spines reported that “with the
exception of Happy, Texas, deal makers offered relatively modest
sums for such modest features as The Blair Witch Project, Twin
Falls Idaho, Tumbleweeds, and the prizewinning documentary American
Movie.” Blair may well have seemed ‘modest’ back then, but
within six months the film had racked up well over $100m at the US box
office to become the most profitable release in the history of cinema.
Few, if any,
observers at wintry Sundance could have predicted such an outcome – the
supposed commercial ‘click’ in-waiting was the mirthless comedy Happy,
Texas. And it was American Movie which attracted the critical
plaudits – ironically enough, given that while Blair was a no-budget
student-style horror movie, mostly set in forests and executed in chilly
black and white, American Movie chronicled the making of
a no-budget student-style horror movie, mostly set in forests and executed
in chilly black and white.
The subtitle
of American Movie is ‘The Making of Northwestern,’ but that’s
misleading – perhaps mischievously so. The cheap horror movie we see being
made is entitled Coven, rhyming with woven, not oven, its director
insists, a direct-sale video short, designed to raise sufficient funds
for the completion of Northwestern, a non-horror feature. That’s
pretty much all the information we’re given about Northwestern
– we find out much more about Coven, and in any case American
Movie is principally a character study of its director, Mark Borchardt,
and his (mostly) supportive circle of family and friends in the decidedly
un-Hollywoodish suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Borchardt
is a gangling, scrawnily intense 30-year-old who looks, appropriately
enough, rather like a young John Carpenter, or one of the Carradine lads.
Supplementing his moviemaking dreams with loans from his father and elderly
uncle, plus menial jobs delivering newspapers and cleaning up cemeteries,
he’s a driven motormouth – sometimes to an alarming degree – constantly
churning out ideas about Coven and Northwestern, and how
he can bring his vision to the screen. Watching Coven gradually
come together, I kept thinking about Equinox, the laughable expanded
student horror flick from 1969 which gave subsequent multiple Oscar winner
and Star Wars effects supremo Dennis Muren his first screen credit,
and also Eraserhead, pieced together (thanks to handouts from Sissy
Spacek) over five years – a periodduring which leading man Jack Nance
had to keep his Van Der Graff hairstyle perfectly in place. If only a
Chris Smith had been around to record David Lynch’s heroics way back then.
Whether or
not he scales the heights of Muren and Lynch, American Movie gives
the forceful Borchardt enough exposure to guarantee at least a cultish
continuation of fame – a comment which also applies to his chubby, monosyllabic,
catatonically laid-back best friend, musician Mark Schank, who comes from
the ‘Reverend Jim’ school of acid casualties.
American
Movie’s director Chris Smith takes a neutral approach to the Borchardt
and Schank double-act. He’s quite happy for the pair to make themselves
look foolish on camera, and accusations that he’s holding the pair up
as hapless hicks for the amusement of a sophisticated audience aren’t
entirely wide of the mark. But perhaps this is a pitfall of presenting
an accurate portrait of people who, while they may occasionally appear
idiotic and misguided come across, by the end of the film, as surprisingly
endearing, even admirable.
Schank does
provide most of the film’s funnier comic moments – but he also provides
(as a preliminary title informs us) American Movie’s effective
guitar soundtrack, and, as the deadline for Coven’s completion
nears, we see that he’s capable of working quickly and efficiently when
the need arises. In addition, it’s a wise move for anybody in Borchardt’s
manic orbit to try to slow the pace down a little, and both Schank and
Borchardt probably play up to the camera every now and again, appreciating
the remarkable degree of publicity a high-profile documentary like American
Movie was likely to afford them.
And it’s certainly
paid off for everybody concerned. The film’s official website (www.americanmovie.com)
reports that, on 28th June 2000, Coven’s video sales
passed the magical 3,000 barrier signalling sufficient profits for the
completion of Northwestern. And, from the limited amount of footage
we’re shown from Coven, its success is by no means undeserved.
While he’s a fairly atrocious actor and has definite limitations as a
scriptwriter and director – notwithstanding the fact that his teenage
film I Blow Up looks like an interesting piece of conceptual art
in the vein of Scorsese’s 1967 squib The Big Shave - Borchardt
may well have the makings of a ‘proper’ cinematographer: the Coven
footage is, surprisingly, more atmospheric and interestingly shot than
anything Chris Smith pulls off in American Movie.
Visual flatness
isn’t a major failing, in a documentary of this type however. More problematic
is the way the film’s 104 minutes drags in sections, largely thanks to
repeated sequences of Borchardt and his family sitting around their house
complaining or staring into space. These sections are all the more irritating
because we could do with seeing much more of the actual nuts-and-bolt
stuff that went into the making of Coven in general. Both films’
(i.e. American Movie’s and Coven’s) set-piece, during
which an actor gets his head pushed through a ‘weakened’ cupboard door,
is a comic highlight, but the final stages of production are glossed over
in a frustratingly brief montage of people being dragged through muddy
streams, etc. We’re also left hungry for more of one of Coven’s
stars, the splendid Robert Richard Jorge, who is to Borchardt what Bela
Lugosi was to Ed Wood.
The film’s
website deadpans: “Born in a small fishing village on the seacoast of
Bohemia, Jorge overcame a childhood stammer by placing pebbles in his
mouth and orating to passing ships.” Like much of the film, this sounds
like a Spinal Tap wind-up – and more than one reviewer has mistaken
American Movie for a sly parody. Jorge, a moustachioed ‘old school’
ham, steals the show with his every appearance, waspishly correcting Borchardt’s
pronunciation of ‘coven’ and delivering a performance which mostly seems
to consist of hysterical screaming. Perhaps Smith didn’t realise what
a gem he’d unearthed in Jorge – or perhaps he was all too aware, and felt
the need to avoid Jorge unbalancing the movie, Martin Landau-style, to
the detriment of its central figures.
Although the
film isn’t without its sombre moments – the economic plight of Borchardt,
who has mountains of bills and must support three young children from
an unsuccessful relationship, is made clear – American Movie is
most effective when it resists the urge to over-emphasise the ‘American
dream’ elements of its central figure. Borchardt furling stars-and-stripes
flags in the cemetery is all very nice and portentous – but we learn a
lot more when we hear one of his brothers casually but acidly commenting
that he thought Mark was best suited for ‘factory work,’ and wouldn’t
be surprised if he ended up as ‘a stalker or a serial killer.’
But he’s is
pretty much a lone voice of dissent. The rest of the Borchardt clan are
more positive, or at least more successful in restraining their disapproval.
And it’s old Uncle Bill who proves the pivotal figure in Coven’s
transition from Mark’s head to cinema screen. Although ancient, Bill is
mentally sharp and notoriously stingy – but that also means he’s sufficiently
well off to offer a (to him) trifling but (to Mark) crucial subsidy. Bill’s
benefits come not so much from movie profits – he’s grimly realistic (though,
as we now know, surprisingly misguided) about Coven’s commercial
prospects – but from the attention he receives, right at the very end
of his life, from his dynamic nephew. Mark, we see, takes good care of
his irascible relative and gives the downbeat Bill something to look forward
to, and something to do – even if that something turns out to be endless
takes of some witless dialogue delivered through a car window.
This has a
doubly effective pay-off – it makes Bill’s finished scene in Coven
all the funnier, and it makes American Movie’s closing titles,
when we’re told what happened to Uncle Bill after filming completed, all
the more satisfyingly touching.
by Neil
Young
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