Photo via The Found Footage Festival
The Found Footage Festival
The Found Footage Festival
The Found Footage Festival has been on the road since 2004, barring periods of worldwide health crisis. It was way back then that a pair of longtime friends who happened to work in legacy media as comedy writers, Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, decided they could piece together enough random footage from lost and forgotten VHS tapes to create a live show. (And, in the process, create their own careers.) Adding their own interpretations and context to the video clips, the pair crafted a video project that begat even more projects.
The Found Footage Festival is on tour and coming to Vivarium on Monday, Dec. 16. At each stop, they showcase a 90-minute compilation of the best (aka the worst) video footage that you’ll likely to ever see. And it’s the life’s work of a pair of decades-long friends, who each bring their own sensibilities of what’s funny into a chaotic, hilarious whole.
Pickett and Prueher are the mainstays of FFF, the founders of the original tour and the same pair that take out videos for public enjoyment today. The two met in Stoughton, WI in sixth grade and have been tight since. The world of media consumption has changed multiple times since they originally took their show out on the road, but (thankfully) there’s still a deep desire for folks to gather together in the spirit of laughter.
Bottomless Pit
Pickett said of their shared collection of VHS oddities, “we started doing this in 2004 and by 2007, we’d thought that we’d found them all.” But they were happily wrong, as the potential stock of new-to-them material is “a bottomless pit.”
These days, the pair still work hard to assemble the world’s largest collection of video oddities, but the search is different. Pickett notes, as an example, thrift stores don’t even stock VHS tapes as much these days, as they simply don’t sell and, thus, take up retail space. But there are still caches out there and now that there’s a two-decade-old show highlighting them, fans are the ones that help stock the floor-to-ceiling studio and storage space in New York that the pair uses for both filming and research.
“What we say on the show is that we have over 11,000 VHS tapes and we’re trying to watch them all,” Pickett said. “We say that we’re about 37% through and I think that’s just about right.”
The good problem being that “every day, new ones show up on our doorstep.”
VCR Party Live!
The show that Pickett references above is the “VCR Party Live!” program that debuted on YouTube during 2019. In it, the pair, along with producer Steve Lawrence and frequent co-host George Pasles, build upon an ever-growing spider’s web of recurring segments, many of which involve inside jokes that build upon themselves over the course of weeks and months and years. It can be thorny to start watching from scratch, as the clips are frequent and funny, but are interspersed with the quartet’s never-ending commentary, be it on the actual videos or whatever someone else just said. Within all that verbal and visual chaos is a hilarious webcast.
“VCR Party Live!” may be the linchpin of FFF’s online programming, but it’s only a part of what wound up as a storm of creativity for all of the FFF crew during Covid. Early on, Lawrence and Pasles undertook a short-lived show called “Frenchy & The Creep,” while the founders undertook the more-freeform “Quarantine Qlassics.” Minus Lawrence, the trio of Prueher, Pasles and Pickett launched “Shaturday Morning Cartoons,” a hilarious send-up of the weird and wonderful cartoons that America enjoyed from the 1970s-’90s, while Prueher (an over-the-top fan) and Pasles (a tepid observer, at best) undertook a show-by-show dissection of “ALF” with “Willie’s Garage.”
If Prueher and Pickett sometimes seem in absolute lockstep on their creative pursuits, “ALF” is one thing that they amusingly disagree on, with Pickett sitting out that show, constantly ribbing Prueher about what he considers a terrible program, adding that “I think a lot of people agree with me.”
Programming Options
That one quibble aside, the pair used Covid as well as any creatives could, building a host of programming options during what most folks would consider the bleakest period of time in their lives. For the FFF crew, though, it was, well, useful.
If anything good came out of the pandemic, Pickett said, it’s the explosion of creativity his network enjoyed during the COVID days. In fact, he says that there’s long been a die-hard audience for the Found Footage Festival’s live show, of which nine have been compiled onto DVD, and a tenth is on the way. But that fan base was expanded exponentially by COVID, as people sat at home looking for fun diversions to the reality taking place outside of their homes and through their TVs via the nightly news.
“There was a whole new audience,” Pickett said of the post-lockdown shows the group undertook. “We started doing “VCR Party” in 2019, but everyone was now locked in and tired of watching reruns. They finished watching the ‘Tiger King’ and wanted to watch more weird (stuff). We started doing other shows during that time, for an audience that’d never seen us live.”
Through the use of Patreon, FFF even added more programming for funders on that platform and have begun offering limited-release films with the producers of those works; those are for sale on their website (foundfootagefestival.com). They’ve also given a first home to “Midnight Rental,” a show hosted by Cleveland photographer and actress Laura Wimbels, who also adds her horror-driven take to the occasional “Shaturday Morning Cartoons” episode. Meanwhile, Caitlin McGurk, a professor, researcher and curator at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, has become the usual, de facto fourth member of the “Shaturday Morning” team, ceding that spot to others when work calls. With these moves, Pickett and Prueher have broken up the earlier tendency of “white guys chuckling together” vibes of the earlier programs.
Chop & Steele
Found Footage Festival’s also broken through to some new viewers by virtue of the film Chop & Steele, a documentary about Prueher and Pickett’s journey onto American TV newscasts, back when they played a pair of hapless workout warriors booked onto morning news shows. Eventually, the duo was sued by one of the station’s corporate owners over their elaborate prank and their expensive, years-long grind through the legal system was captured in “Chop & Steele,” one of the many titles they sell through their web store and a title that’s still gaining fans at film fests.
Between their Patreon supporters, t-shirt sales on the website, the occasional college speaking gig and various other money-making schemes, the pair have kept their burgeoning network going, while knowing that the FFF touring schedule is the thing that really puts the nickels in their pockets.
They’re not just entertaining, Pickett suggests, they’re providing a service.
“There’s so much stuff out there that you need a tour guide,” he said. “Somebody who can do the research, can give you the best representations of the videos and can also make them funny. We edit them, take out the boring parts, get into the meat of it.”
And in doing so, they’ve made more lifelong friends, as “the best part of this thing is that we’ve met so many like-minded people. They have a sense of humor. They know what’s funny and have the same sensibility. We’re not laughing at people but are laughing in a celebratory way.”
