Photo Courtesy of Found Footage Festival
Found Footage Festival co-founders Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher
More than ever, today’s breakthroughs are tomorrow’s trash. And the travel time from honored place in the home to bottom of the landfill grows exponentially faster. As always, there are gleaners looking for gold, scavengers picking in the debris.
For Joe Pickett, Goeff Haas and Nick Prueher, scavenging became a career when they turned some of their odder finds in thrift store VCR bins into the Found Footage Film Festival (FFFF). The annual traveling event presents a curated collection of their “best-of” (hilariously worst of?) discoveries amidst the detritus of the American home video market. FFFF has turned up at the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, the New York Comedy Festival and other events. Highlights have been released on DVD, a medium that may well provide material for the next generation of scavengers.
Prueher and Pickett grew up in Stoughton, WI and entertained themselves by hitting the thrift stores. “We started finding some incredible VHS tapes and sharing them with friends in my parents’ living room,” he recalls. The two friends moved to Milwaukee and hit “pay dirt” in West Allis and elsewhere in the area. “In 2004, we decided to take our VHS collection outside of living rooms and put it in theaters and, amazingly, people responded.”
Now based in Brooklyn, FFFF is hitting the road this year with a show they called “Cherished Gems,” which compiles all-time favorite finds along with new finds. “One video that never gets old for me is Petpourri, a pet advice call-in show from Long Island,” Prueher says. “We found dozens of episodes and cut together our favorite moments of animal chaos.” Their dodge for copyright problems is the copyright law’s fair use clause “because we’re offering a commentary and transforming the footage into something new.”
They continue to comb resale stores around the country looking for tapes. “It is getting harder to find material that we haven’t seen already, and some thrift stores aren’t even accepting VHS donations any more because nobody’s buying it. That chills me to the core,” Prueher says. But not to worry. “If the apocalypse happens today, we’ll have enough material to last us for another 15 years at least.”
Is FFFF imbued with a Midwest sensibility, as some have described it? Not intentionally, Prueher says, adding that “it’s bound to happen” because of where they grew up and the large collection of Wisconsin-made tapes, including industrial training videos, they found here. “Plus, our show isn’t mean spirited,” he says. “We have a genuine love for these VHS oddities. Maybe the biggest way our show is Midwestern is that we never schedule a show during a Packer game.”
Will VHS make a comeback just like vinyl LPs? “There is certainly a small but devoted group of VHS enthusiasts out there who appreciate the aesthetic and wonderful earnestness of the format, but I don’t think it’ll ever be as sexy as vinyl. While we’d personally be thrilled to find a mint condition copy of How to Spot Counterfeit Beanie Babies on VHS, it’s not going to get you laid. I have a 25-year case study that bears that out.”
The Found Footage Film Festival returns to Milwaukee on Saturday, Nov. 24 in the Colectivo Back Room, 2211 N. Prospect. Doors open at 7 p.m. The show begins at 8. Tickets are $12.
