Found Footage Festival Returns to Milwaukee

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For Found Footage Festival co-founder Nick Prueher, the medium he celebrates may not be the message. But that medium, VHS videocassettes, allows for a wildly wide array of messages that can make for a night of laughter. 

“In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, VHS became so ubiquitous and so affordable that anyone with a half-baked idea could produce a video. And because of that, you got a lot of weird, esoteric tapes,” says Prueher, explaining of the basis for the Found Footage Festival concept he and Joe Pickett have been touring for nearly 18 years. More recently, they’ve turned it into a bit of an online empire as well.

Found Footage Festival (FFF) makes a return to Milwaukee at 8 p.m. Sunday, Dec.19 at The Back Room @ Colectivo (2211 N. Prospect Ave.). 

It’s not only the eclectic, often obscure breadth of the videos clips gleaned from the duo’s collection of over 11,000 tapes that make an evening of Found Footage a hoot. It’s the varying levels of competence with which the source material was executed. “This was a new format as well,” Prueher offers, “so people weren’t savvy with video production the way the layperson is now.” The cumulative effect is practically, if hilariously, anthropological in scope. Or, as Prueher puts it. “As a result, VHS gives us a pretty accurate warts-and-all look at our culture.”

Funny and Kitsch

“All our material is 100% kitsch, that is, unintentionally funny footage that was intended for an entirely different audience,” Prueher says. “These are exercise videos that were for your mom to sweat to in your living room, or training videos for janitors at McDonald’s to watch in a break room, which is why it’s so fun for us to project it on a big screen in a room full of like-minded weirdos. There’s something transformative about the experience.”

Prueher and Pickett’s upcoming Milwaukee gig will debut their latest compilation of clips-set to include snippets from the 1987 Miss Junior America Wisconsin pageant, a "bonion sergery" (so says the tape's label), and a fitness help entitled Skiercisce—but there is room for some leeway in the show amid the set of video segments. 

“We have a set lineup of videos we’ve prepared for our Milwaukee show, and we know roughly what we want to say about them,” he continues. “But the rest is extemporaneous and evolves as we tour with the show. That's a lot of the fun for us: trying out a new edit and seeing where the laughs fall, tweaking the edit the next night and seeing what happens, trying out new jokes. The show at Colectivo will be a little different than the one we’re doing in Chicago the next night.”

Decisions, Decisions

However, putting together the components for one FFF show is less casual than Prueher and Pickett may make it appear. “The whole process takes about a year, and most of that is watching all the videos we’ve found since our last show, digitizing the stuff we think is funny, and then editing our favorite parts into montages or standalone clips. Then we lock ourselves in our office for about three months and tweak the edits and riff on the videos until we have a show. It’s like choosing a new pope; when white smoke rises from our chimney in Brooklyn, we’ve got a new show.

“In college, I was lucky enough to get an internship on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and that show was a revelation for me in high school. I was like, ‘Wait, you make a living making jokes about bad movies?’ That was something my friends and I did almost every night." Prueher recalls of the sci-fi and horror-lampooning cable show that has become a touring stage show in recent years, too. 

During the height of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions when stage shows weren't being staged, Prueher and 

Pickett weren’t inactive. “Since we’ve been doing this so long, we are known as the go-to repository for unintentionally funny videos. Every day, we get a box in the mail from someone around the world who has dug up some VHS gold and sent it to us. That’s kept us going during the pandemic when we haven't been able to travel and do our usual thrift store excursions.”

Additionally, the duo beefed up their YouTube channel with copious content, started a Patreon account for more financial support and a video streaming channel, the SLP Club, which Prueher describes as “a Netflix for weirdos” containing all of FFF’s content and new material twice weekly. 

“Our videos are essentially worthless to anyone except us, and we prefer it that way,” Prueher concludes. “We’re archivists for the videos that no one else cares about.”

Here's a taste of what to the variety to expect at the latest Found Footage Festival iteration by way of a preview of its tor a few years ago...