Preview: Found Footage Festival 2018

Childhood friends Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher are back after their two sell-out shows at Cube cinema in 2017, serving up their dirtiest, most disturbing, and patently misguided VHS finds from 25 years of collecting.

The Found Footage Festival, America’s acclaimed touring showcase of odd and hilarious found videos, brings its 2018 show to Arnolfini, showcasing videos found at garage sales and thrift stores and in warehouses and dumpsters throughout North America.

Comedians Joe Pickett (The Onion) and Nick Prueher (The Colbert Report) take audiences on a guided tour of their latest and greatest VHS finds, providing live commentary and where-are-they-now updates on the people in these videotaped obscurities.

From the curiously-produced industrial training video to the forsaken home movie donated to Goodwill, the Found Footage Festival resurrects these forgotten treasures and serves them up in a lively celebration of all things found.

Highlights of the new show include:
● A home movie documenting a debaucherous holiday weekend in rural Michigan
● A New Age exercise video demonstrating a process called “testicle breathing”
● The “sexy” hype video for a 1980s pro wrestling duo called The Fabulous Ones
● Behind-the-scenes footage from a fishing-themed calendar called Women In Waders.

Here’s FFF’s Nick Prueher.

How did Found Footage come into being? Did you both have a soft spot for collecting weird old DVDs from thrift stores?
[Co-founder] Joe [Pickett] and I were very bored teenagers in a small town in the Midwest and we spent most of our time in thrift stores looking for things to entertain ourselves with. In the early 1990s, we started finding a lot of VHS tapes – exercise videos, promotional tapes, other people’s home movies, educational videos hosted by Mr. T – and started buying them. And sometimes we’d find videos in even more out-of-the-way places, like the break room of the McDonald’s I worked at in high school.
Fifteen years later, we had a collection of about 1,500 videos that we’d screen at parties, along with our running commentary, for friends. Now our collection is around 10,000 VHS tapes and we’ve taken what we did in our living room to theatres all over the world. Wherever we go, we still hit charity shops and estate sales looking for more videos. It’s an endless cycle.

What genres of films – home movies, workplace training videos, etc – seem to regularly produce the best stuff? Or is there comedy gold everywhere when you know where to look?
I really like workplace training videos because they always try to get cute about their corporate indoctrination. It’s like, “You have to work at Burger King – why not throw in a rapping burger to teach you about the grill?” It’s so wonderfully insulting.
Also, these places don’t just give out their training videos for free. We’ve had to get creative on occasion. About 15 years ago, Joe heard about a store in the mall with a training video featuring Wayne’s World impersonators, so he applied for a job there, worked a full shift, then pilfered the training videos and brought them home. The Wayne and Garth video wasn’t in the batch of videos, unfortunately, but there was an anti-shoplifting tape in there. There’s some irony in that.

And what about nationalities? I guess the majority of your stuff is from the US, but do any other countries/cultures crop up regularly?
Since we’ve started touring more regularly overseas, we’ve begun finding more UK and European footage on VHS. I don’t think you guys had the glut of videos being produced in the 1980s and ’90s that we did in America – but there are still some gems to be found. For example, we’ve found a ton of cricket bloopers tapes and one called Famous Tits & Arses that I found delightfully tacky. If anyone’s found any footage in Bristol, please bring it to the show and we’ll play it next time.

How much of the show’s premise is simply laughing (fondly?) at the recent past? Watch stuff from the Sixties and it’s now acquired the patina of history… but people in 80s or 90s clothes, hairstyles and moustaches still look endearingly naff, and the technology in particular looks still-recognizable but clunky. Is that what’s so richly humorous about the stuff you find?
The comedy comes less from the regrettable fashions and hairstyles and more from the endearing earnestness of people trying their best despite a really terrible idea. VHS is a unique format in that, for the first time, people could watch movies and other, weirder programmes in their homes for the first time. And the format was so cheap to produce that anyone with an inkling of an idea – no matter how poorly thought-out or misguided – could get it made.
That’s why we find videos like Rent-A-Friend, a virtual friend who keeps you company on your VCR, and exercise tapes like Testicle Breathing. VHS was new, it was affordable, and people were trying a bunch of ideas and seeing what stuck. No one had any idea what they were doing, so there’s a naïveté that you don’t see nowadays. [Here are some sample covers of VHS tapes from the era].

You recently won a legal case against Wisnconsin’s WEAU-TV, who fell for your spoof strongman duo. What was your aim with the Chop & Steele spoof, and how happy (relieved?) are you to be vindicated?
Joe and I tour most of the year and we often appear on local TV morning shows to promote the Found Footage Festival – but, about seven years ago, we got really sick of doing these. The news anchors weren’t doing their homework on what we did, they’d get the title of the show wrong or forget we were coming altogether.
So, as an experiment, with our friend Mark [Proksch] we started sending out patently ridiculous press releases – for yo-yo experts, celebrity chefs and motivational strongmen – to see if the news companies would be gullible enough to book fake people. And of course they were.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi3Kl8O3_UU

Clip above: The Found Footage guys’ spoof strongmen duo Chop & Steele, which fooled Wisconsin’s KX News

The news did no scrutiny and booked Kenny the Yo-Yo Master, Chef Keith and Chop & Steele without question. Then last year, one of the news stations didn’t find the appearance on their show funny and, instead of training their journalists better, they filed a lawsuit against us in federal court.
We had to get a lawyer, turn over tons of emails, and get grilled by opposing lawyers in a week’s worth of depositions. It was kind of hilarious but it was also a living hell. Finally, after a year of pestering us, they wised up and settled after we refused to kowtow to their demands. We feel vindicated, but it’s scary how much a media company with big pockets can intimidate and silence people who are rightly criticizing lazy journalists.

Give us a couple of highlights from this year’s show.
There’s a video called How to Have Cybersex on the Internet, which is as timeless as it is wholly unnecessary. It needs to be seen to be believed. [Here’s a brief preview].
And we’ve also cut together a montage of our sexiest exercise tapes, including one featuring Angela Lansbury. Super sexy stuff.

The Found Footage Festival 2018 visits Arnolfini on Aug 29. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.foundfootagefest.com/tour/event/bristol-uk