Neil Young's Film Lounge

Neil Young’s Film Lounge – American Movie

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, its illuminating to view it as a late footnote to the Blair Witch phenomenon. In an article on Utahs 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. Thats pretty much all the information were 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 Lynchs 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 Movies director Chris Smith takes a neutral approach to the Borchardt and Schank double-act. Hes 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 films funnier comic moments but he also provides (as a preliminary title informs us) American Movies effective guitar soundtrack, and, as the deadline for Covens completion nears, we see that he’s capable of working quickly and efficiently when the need arises. In addition, its a wise move for anybody in Borchardts 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 its certainly paid off for everybody concerned. The films official website (www.americanmovie.com) reports that, on 28^th June 2000, Covens video sales passed the magical 3,000 barrier signalling sufficient profits for the completion of Northwestern. And, from the limited amount of footage were 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 Scorseses 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 films 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 Movies and Covens) 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. Were also left hungry for more of one of Covens stars, the splendid Robert Richard Jorge, who is to Borchardt what Bela Lugosi was to Ed Wood.

The films 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 Borchardts 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 its old Uncle Bill who proves the pivotal figure in Covens transition from Marks 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. Bills benefits come not so much from movie profits he’s grimly realistic (though, as we now know, surprisingly misguided) about Covens 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 Bills finished scene in Coven all the funnier, and it makes American Movies closing titles, when were told what happened to Uncle Bill after filming completed, all the more satisfyingly touching.

by Neil Young

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