EP038 – Shelly Duval’s Putter w/ Joe Pickett

Ben squeezes into the VHS vault that is the Found Footage Festival (FFF) headquarters in NY with Joe Pickett—half of the FFF comedy duo who quit his job to follow a dirty country singer for four years, turned stolen instructional videos into a 20-year comedy empire, and once declared a half-naked woman painting ceramic clowns “the greatest moment in VHS history.” Joe walks us through his filmmaking suicide pact with Nick Prueher, explains why Larry Pierce’s “I Like to (BEEP)” changed everything, and reveals the dark truth about JINGLE BABIES. From sleeping on floors for a full year to getting sued in federal court for morning show pranks, Joe’s path from documentary filmmaker to comedy archeologist proves you need to be willing to sleep on couches in order to finish what you start. We’re surrounded by 14,638 tapes (no doubles), a giant Bart Simpson mask, and a signed GROWING PAINS poster that survived the New York subway. Plus: his new doc is so illegal you have to sign an NDA just to watch it.

Discussion links: VHS PARTY LIVE! (2026) | DIRTY COUNTRY (2007) | CHOP & STEELE (2022) | AMERICAN MOVIE (1999

) | SHERMAN’S MARCH (1985) | WINNEBAGO MAN (2009)

Timestamps: 00:00 Welcome to Found Footage Festival HQ 02:42 The origin story: Larry Pierce and dirty country music 07:41 Quitting jobs and the suicide pact 11:17 Following weirdos for four and a half years 15:28 How Found Footage Festival started as fundraising 19:56 South by Southwest premiere and audience award 24:19 Greatest hits from the VHS vault 29:13 What makes bad things good 34:24 Lightning round: American Movie as gateway drug 40:00 Advice for aspiring filmmakers: sleep on couches 45:00 Video Filmed for Life—the illegal documentary

Okay.

Lemme see.

Found footage right there.

There it is.

Okay.

All right.

Don't get the code on here though.

We have valuable stuff

on your left.

You're listening to Doc Walk with Ben and Keith.

Here's our vending machine there.

Ooh, la la.

Stop that About a year ago.

Yeah.

Total game changer.

I actually just got an instructional video about how to strategically

place vending machines.

Oh.

So now I look at vending machines differently now.

Uh, here's the

office.

I'm having some flashbacks from Chop Steele Yeah.

Stepping back into this office.

And what was that like

five, six years ago?

We got even more tape since then.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's become a problem.

We had a, second office because we were just overflowing and then

we lost a subletter, so we had to move all the tapes into one office,

and they're just stacking up.

I mean, like, look it how to strip for your lover is in a box on the floor.

Oh.

So Oh, that's a shame.

Yeah, I know it well, but at least it's like readily available, you know?

Right.

Where that is, is I know exactly where, how a strip free lover is.

Yeah.

Okay.

I, I am here with Joe Pickett, my buddy.

Yep.

A guy I have made a documentary about.

Yep.

Documentary, filmmaker, comedian, performer,

all those things.

Author.

Author.

What else?

Softball player.

Softball player.

Yeah.

Works.

Works at the Onion.

Yeah.

Well, kind of.

I mean, I used to con contributor.

I could work at The Onion if I wanted to.

I'm a, I'm a, I'm a contributor.

I'm still on the emails, so I could send them jokes if I wanted to, but I haven't.

Yes.

All those things.

It's me.

Here we are found footage, festival offices,

and most importantly, you are half of the found footage Festival.

Yep.

Which there's a big sign right here.

Yep.

Up above.

And then this is your set where you guys, do you record your show?

VCR

Party?

Yeah.

Do a Tuesday night show on YouTube called VCR Party.

We used to do it in the office and then the pandemic happened and then we're like,

oh, this is way easier to do at home,

so, right.

Oh, so you don't, this actually isn't your set anymore?

No, this is the old set.

I mean, we will come in here, we'll do, we call 'em fawns?

We'll do marathons where we just watch one type of video all day long and raise money

for charity or for ourselves or Okay.

Some sort of cause or project or something.

But yeah, we, we just use that for this now it's mostly office

for fulfilling our found footage, orders and storing the tapes.

Really?

Half the collection is here.

The other half is in Chicago.

I just moved to Chicago.

So

this isn't even the whole collection?

No,

no.

There's like, wow.

7,000 more videos now over in Chicago.

Oh my gosh.

And you know what, I'm just noticing, I haven't seen this before.

Oh yeah.

This is all, uh, these are all scenes from chopping steel.

What's the story with this?

A guy, bill Mancuso, he's an artist.

He, he creates toys and he always, he creates all this cool stuff for us.

Here, let me twist this around.

Yeah.

He makes all this, uh, wow.

He's a really talented guy.

So he made us, he, this is a Buffet Dangler, which is a reference

to a Pizza Hut training video.

A buffet.

Yeah.

That seems like the kind of thing we may not be able to say on this show.

It does sound dirty, doesn't it?

It really does.

But you look it up on the Urban dictionary.

Yeah.

And you're like, Ooh, what is that?

Yeah, it's like the right next to the rusty trombone, right?

The buffet.

Uh,

yeah.

So this is, I mean, it's just, this is a museum at this point,

like a very disorganized museum.

We got Rejuven on the wall.

Wow.

We got like fan made clowns.

We got a shitload of VHS tape winders.

Oh, that one's a Corvette.

Yeah, that's the classic.

That's the sleek one.

Look at this though.

We got a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube.

Wow.

And they, and they send you a plaque?

They send you a plaque that we kind of just hide up on a

shelf, but we also had them.

Yeah.

It

blends in, uh, right next to the how uh, ordinary people get rich.

Yeah.

EHS tape there.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Did you see how footage was spelled?

Photo found Photo fest.

Yep.

That's sort of apropos, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Wow.

So how many tapes would you guess you have here?

Well, I always say 14,638 with, with no doubles.

'cause that's roughly what I estimated one time, like six months ago.

Wow.

And so, and no doubles.

We, we started getting rid of our doubles by doing VHS of the Month Club.

Oh, okay.

So we, for $12 a month, you can get a VHS tape from the found

footage, festival collection.

Delivered to your doorstep, so, okay.

You know, we're trying to, we don't wanna throw this stuff

away so you're thinning it out.

Yeah.

I'm sending it out to people who might not have good thrift stores near them

so they can get a good weird tape.

We don't send them like, you know, Titanics or like, you know, liar,

liar or Jerry McGuire or anything.

Right.

We send them,

these are like our, like instructional videos, kind of like obscure.

That's what we, unusual things.

Yeah.

That's, that's what we collect is, is a special interest.

Mostly special interest.

Okay.

I think is the category.

But, you know, hunting videos or dance instructional videos and Yeah.

That's our bread and butter since day one.

Well, and you have the unique distinction of being one of, I, I think

actually the only guest who has ever gone from documentary filmmaker to.

Comedian.

Yeah.

With a traveling archival show.

It was a documentary that got us into this.

Exactly.

Which is so wild.

'cause usually it would be sort of the other way around, you would think, right?

Like somebody would go into movie making from standup comedy as like

a maybe a safer career choice.

Yeah.

But you went the other direction.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So

tell us that story.

Okay, so I've always had a love of weirdos.

Yeah.

Like, since I was very young, I've always been, my grandpa was a weirdo.

So like I, I

speak, you come from a long line of weirdos.

I do.

I speak fluent weirdo and I love being around them.

I love movies about weirdos and, I don't know, they're just more

interesting than normal people.

Yeah.

And Nick and I, we've known each other since we were in sixth grade, but

once we got our driver's licenses, we would go around and we would.

Drive and, uh, go on road trips.

And we went to a truck stop one time and we found an album

by a guy named Larry Pierce.

Mm-hmm.

And he's a dirty country music singer.

He, he wrote these like jaw droppingly, filthy songs.

And when you say album, that's almost like, that sounds almost like highfalutin.

These are like cassette tapes that you buy at like a truck stop.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

It was a cassette tape.

Yeah.

And do you remember the name of it?

Songs for

Studs?

Yeah.

Was the first.

Was the first one.

Okay.

But we put it in, we thought it was gonna be like novelty music,

you know, slide whistles and like, you know, winking at the camera

and just, you know, not very good.

But the songs were genuinely well written.

The guy had a great voice.

Hmm.

The lyrics were clever.

He eased you into the dirty song, you know, like he didn't

just jump into a dirty song.

Right.

He started it off as a love song.

Then maybe like a third of the way through, he started giving you hints

like, oh, this is a dirty song.

Right.

Because the songs are titled like.

What,

like, well, I, I think the best example is I like to fuck.

Yeah.

Very subtle.

Very poetic.

But it starts off like, uh, you know, there are things that people like to do,

people, uh, shooting pool and playing cards and uh, you know, stuff like that.

And then, then he's like, but what I like to do is I like to fuck.

And so, and so you guys hear this and you're like, mesmerized,

like, who is this weirdo?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and then we were like, we need more.

So we went back to that same truck stop and we got other

movie or other albums by him.

And, uh, turns out he had about a dozen at truck that you could

only get a truck stop, so you couldn't get him anywhere else.

And so we knew all his lyrics.

We knew all his songs.

And then I was like, we gotta shoot a music video for this guy.

And Nick and I had been making videos, you know, mostly in our backyard in college.

We went to college together, we would shoot videos.

And

you guys grew up in, uh, Wisconsin in like small town Wisconsin.

Small town

Wisconsin, right?

Stoughton, Wisconsin Stoke.

Yeah.

And so there's not a ton to do there.

No.

So you guys are like kind of creating your own fun.

Exactly.

And I know this from making the documentary about you guys, but you

start like doing pranks and you, you're like writing a comedy newspaper.

Yeah.

You're selling prank phone call tapes at your high school.

Yeah.

So you guys are like interested in comedy.

Yes.

And

like, and there's a ton of comedy around you in a small town.

Right.

You know, ev everywhere.

Uh Right.

And, you know, we weren't, I don't know, we weren't like big drinker partier guys.

We liked watching dorky comedy stuff.

Right.

And we loved The Onion and we loved all, you know, all that stuff.

So yeah, there's a lot of comedy to be found in the Midwest.

And we found this guy Larry Pierce, and I was like, let's shoot a music

video for him, or maybe we can do a short documentary about him.

Yeah.

And, and, uh, so I wrote a letter to the distributor and I said, Hey, the big

fan of Larry Pierce, is there any way we could make a video for him or something?

And they said, we'll forward, forward it onto Larry.

And so.

Within six days, I got a response from Larry.

Yeah.

Saying handwritten in pencil.

Yeah.

Saying I appreciate the letter, but my life's not that interesting.

I work third shift in a factory and I write dirty songs on the

weekends, and I plan with my buddies and, and you're like, sold.

Yeah.

So, oh, that, so Nick and I, we called it our, we called it our suicide pact.

We just both quit our jobs immediately.

Wow.

And, and how

old are you

at

this point?

This is 2003.

So what am I 26?

Six or so.

Okay.

Yeah.

Mid twenties or so.

Okay.

I was working at a video and film rental house In Minneapolis called

Cinequipt Right, right, right.

And so I would duplicate videos for people, but I also rented out equipment,

so I had a ton of equipment, so I was like, I have all this equipment.

Let's just go follow this guy for a weekend.

We had all the bells and whistles, lights and everything.

Cool.

But we never made a documentary before, so I actually remember watching a

bunch of, uh, Maisel Brothers stuff.

Yeah.

'cause they're a two man crew.

Right.

You know?

Right, right.

And I remember thinking like, man, if they could do this

in, what was it, the sixties?

Yeah.

With a great big 60 millimeter camera.

Huge analog analogs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They shot

it on an analog.

We, we have a DVX 100, you know.

Yeah.

And, and I know how to do audio and we can get two man crew with this.

So

I, I interviewed Albert Maisels way a long time ago, and I asked

him like, what's the ideal.

Size of a crew.

And he is like, he's like, the only size for a crew is two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I agree with that though.

Yeah.

I, if you have too many cooks in the kitchen, it's just

gonna throw everybody off.

Exactly.

And then it feels like a, a shoot.

So, yeah.

So it actually worked out well because, you know, these people weren't used

to having cameras around and Right.

We could kind of be a little hidden.

We had a small camera audio mixer and it followed him around

for four and a half years.

Wow.

And so the way that, the, the way that it started was we, we were there for a week.

We met him and his friends and we're like, oh, these are interesting.

They're great people.

They're funny.

And you know, this documentary probably has, you know, could be a short,

could be a 15 to 20 minutes short.

And did you save up money?

Like you quit your job, you go to Indiana where this guy

lives, you're filming with him?

Not yet.

So the,

the, at the end of the week while we were there, Larry got a phone call.

From somebody in Las Vegas who wanted to bring him there.

He was being forced into retirement at his job.

He was a, he worked third shift at a factory, which just

sounds like a country lyric.

I know.

Exactly.

And, and, uh, married with kids and Wow.

But he was getting laid off and he was bummed out.

But then he got this call from somebody in Las Vegas who

wanted to have him down on the.

Hmm.

And have his own show.

And he'd never been out of Indiana.

He's never played his music outside Indiana.

That's when Nick and I were like, okay, here's the story.

Yeah.

Well we were also like, that's the suicide pact, right.

Once we found out, oh, there's something happening with the story.

Yeah.

He, Nick was working at David Letterman at the time, Uhhuh and I was working at

the video or the, uh, film rental house.

Right.

And so we're like, let's just quit.

So we both quit.

Wow.

And we're like, we'll figure out how to raise money.

We didn't know how to do anything.

Yeah.

But you know, when you're in your twenties, that's, yeah.

It doesn't matter.

That's, we do stuff like that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's, that is the time to do it.

And when you don't know how hard it's gonna be.

Yes, exactly.

I don't, I don't think I would do that now.

I

Well, you don't, it jaded.

You don't have a real

job to quit.

No, I really don't.

I kind of figured it out.

I mean, yeah.

I mean, yeah, I'm living at the poverty level still, but Yeah.

But still, I love what I do.

So, um, so yeah, we quit our jobs and then we went back down to.

I'm filming with him and he's getting ready to move out to Las Vegas and

we're like, we got this great story.

And they were depleting their food supply 'cause they were gonna

move and Oh my, that was excited.

And he was like figuring out a set list and then all of a sudden they

pull the plug on him and say, oh nope, we're not gonna do it anymore.

It was just like that.

And he got really depressed and he was like, oh man, now I'm getting laid off.

I got my hopes up for this thing and now I'm still just gonna be here.

So we're like, okay, we gotta.

We had already quit our jobs at that point.

Are you calling your old job back?

Being on second thought?

No, I'm not.

I'm like, we gotta figure this out.

So we found out that there's this whole world of dirty

music out there at the time.

This is 2003, right?

It was all, you know, underground stuff.

There was no Spotify back then or streaming.

Sure.

But there was this, they called 'em party records, like back in the sixties, and

we found out that there was this band called Doug Clark and the hot nuts.

An all black like kind of a dirty.

Blues rock kind of They would would play frat houses.

Oh, wow.

So we went to this frat house and we watched these old guys load up all

their stuff into a frat house Wow.

With all these like, kind of like rich white frat kids.

And we're just like, these guys are still doing, these guys are elderly too.

They're elderly.

Wow.

And they're still doing these dirty songs.

And so you cover these guys.

They're in the movie.

Yeah.

Wow.

We follow, we followed him Doug Clark.

Uh, well, Doug Clark's dead.

It's his brother, but they still call it Doug Clark's Hot Nuts.

And then we followed Blowfly.

Okay.

For a weekend.

And that was insane.

He's the original dirty rapper.

We followed Dr. Uh, dirty John Alby.

Okay.

From State New York.

He's still tours.

He's still around.

Wow.

And he sings filthy songs.

And then we found this band called Itis Uhhuh, who was covering Larry Pear songs.

How about show us the Dirty Country poster here.

He's a

dirty country poster.

We had, uh,

get a visual for,

yeah.

Larry Pierce.

Yep.

That's Larry Pierce.

That's a aesthetic apparatus.

Did the artwork for OUTTA Minneapolis.

Cool.

And uh.

Yeah.

Right next to your, uh, elf painting.

Yeah.

It's a, the Elf painting's a very long story.

You know,

I, we don't we don't have time for that.

No, no.

That's a whole other

podcast.

Yeah.

But we were talking about the origin of found footage.

So you guys are making this documentary, you're figuring out

like, oh, we gotta pay for this now.

Right, right.

And well, we had always wanted to do it.

I, I did a, I called it the City Magic Video Club when I worked

at a video duplication house.

Uh, and I would get, you know, I'd get like, industrial films that I'd

have to duplicate, like safety films.

And I was like, oh, this, these are too good.

Right?

Like, I gotta show my friends these things.

So I would always make an extra copy for myself.

And these are like McDonald's training videos and like insurance

safety videos?

Yes.

Federated Mutual Insurance.

Yes.

They, they put out these incredible safety videos, so I would make copies and then

I had a subscription service to mostly my friends, but some other people got it.

It was like, you know, it was the tape trading era, right.

Of VH.

Yeah, I know it well from Winnebago, man, and we talk about that in that movie.

Yeah.

I interview you guys.

Yeah.

Which I think is how we first met,

right?

Winnebago man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is

that I knew about your show and that you guys showed Winnebago man,

right, as part of your show and that you would go and find these.

People in the clips.

Yeah.

Often.

And so I reached out to you guys about helping me find Jack, or letting

you know, I was trying to find him.

Yep.

And then came to Nick's apartment.

Yep.

I remember that.

Didn't think Yeah.

Yeah.

And didn't interview.

Well,

I remember when you came I was, I was like, well, good luck.

We tried finding him and we couldn't find him anywhere.

Yeah.

And, and then I was like, oh, even if you do find him, like, you know, I, I mean,

I want, I was rooting for you, but I, but I was skeptical of how far you would get.

You were like, this kid doesn't say the chance.

Exactly.

And it sounds like you were kind of like, like us at the time too.

You're using credit cards, you're asking people for money.

Oh yeah.

You're quitting jobs.

Well, the difference is that I'd studied film as an undergrad and then

I was, uh, basically like making a living, making films for other people

and then making my stuff on the side.

Yeah.

So I had like an understanding of how you would maybe go about funding something.

Okay.

But the similarity is that because it was about a foul mouth, blooper reel

basically, and me finding this guy, yeah.

Nobody was giving me grant money Yeah.

To do that.

And so I basically had to just use my own money and

Yeah.

Bank loans and credit cards and the goodwill of friends

to come and work for free.

I also was skeptical of how you would make a documentary out of

this, like a feature length were were you thinking short at first?

No.

I'd made at least half a dozen shorts, if not more.

And I was coming outta grad school, and that was actually my senior thesis

project, and I did make a short version to fulfill my grad school obligations.

Yeah.

But I used the Wes Anderson bottle rocket model where I was like, I'll

use, I'll make a short, use that to.

At the time, I wanted to raise some money with it.

I didn't end up raising money, but I found my collaborators, I found Joel

Heller, my producer, and, um, Malcolm Inger, producer and editor be on the

strength of the short, basically.

Yeah.

And then that helped me turn it into a feature, but I was hell

bent on like, no more shorts.

This is gonna be my first future, you know?

Come Hell or Water

was also, I guess what I was skeptical of is how are you

gonna find a story in Right.

This funny internet video.

Exactly.

You know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

And I

really lucked out that Jack Rebny

sort of Oh, was a jump,

was a j Yeah.

You know, and he, he pretended to be one thing on the first trip, and then

called me back and, and we come back the second time, and then that blew up.

And then the third time was, yeah.

So the, the 1, 2, 3 structure provided a perfect arc.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

With Larry, we had to.

Redo everything.

Once we found out he wasn't gonna Las Vegas, right.

And then he found this band, itis Uhhuh and who had been covering his music.

And when we met itis, they're like, we heard it, that Larry doesn't have any

teeth and that he puts in his dentures and he'll spit out his dentures.

Like all these like things about, like this legend of Larry's like,

no, he works at a factory and writes these songs in his garage.

Right?

And and they're like, what?

Really?

So we're like, okay, we found a new arc here.

Yeah, we found a new story.

Yes.

So they went and met with him and they're like, they met him and they

hit it off right away and they're like, Larry, you can't be playing these songs

in your garage in small town Indiana.

Right.

You need to take this out on the road.

So they lined up a whole tour.

He played for the first time.

The ending of the documentary is him.

I'm playing for the first time on a stage in Minneapolis.

What people who know all of his songs because IDAs had been playing his songs.

Oh, cool.

And he found this whole new world of friends.

I mean, it was a happy ending because he got laid off from his job.

Right.

He found this new career path.

Yeah.

With his new friends.

Oh.

And they sort of, he got on Howard Stern show.

Howard Stern was a fan.

Amazing.

See, so

you did something similar that I inadvertently did for Jack Reney, which

is like gave them this kind of spotlight or this stage on which to be celebrated.

Yeah.

And I didn't know that that was what I was doing necessarily.

Right.

Starting out.

But I approached it as a fan and like I just loved.

This clip and I was really sincerely curious to meet this

guy, and there was like zero.

Gotcha.

Right.

I'm gonna make some sort of like funny, like laughing at you expose.

Yeah.

And it's interesting that like both of our movies kind of have

a, the same ending in a way.

Well, exactly.

And, and both of us saw the genius in what they did.

Right.

If there's, you know, if we, if we love it, like other people are gonna like it.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

We just have to trust, I guess.

Exactly.

Yeah,

exactly.

And we just, you just have to tell the story, right?

Yeah.

You know, so you, so you make the movie, it premieres it south by.

Right?

Yep.

And then what happens from there?

It wins at South by, it wins the audience award.

Oh, too.

It was, it was, uh, it did.

Well, it, uh, you know, it's, we sold out all of our screenings, which I think isn't

that hard to do at South By Southwest.

People were laughing and cheering and it was, it was so fun.

I just have so many fond memories.

South by Southwest will always be my favorite because of that.

We had, yeah.

Two other shorts in South by Southwest before that Uhhuh.

And it was just always, Austin was just a magical place.

Yeah.

It was just that draft house.

You could get a bucket of beers.

Yeah.

And I was like, this is my favorite place.

It's still,

it still is.

It's still magical.

Yeah.

So what, you guys were making shorts before then?

Yeah.

And were, what were those about?

So, so the short, the first one that we got into South by Southwest was, um.

Gas and Fuel employee training, video number four A making it Happen.

And that was based on McDonald's training video.

It rolls

right off the tongue.

Yeah.

Well that's what all these training videos are called.

You know, they always have a really long name with a subtitle

and then a number after it.

So in high school, Nick stole a McDonald's training video.

Yes.

Called Inside and Outside Custodian.

I remember this is the origin story of this is the Origin Found

Footage festival.

Yeah.

And we watched it constantly.

We roomed together in college.

We had to write commentary.

We would invite people over to watch this McDonald's training video.

Yes.

And it was, oh, you know, it was like almost cathartic.

'cause we all had to work those shitty jobs, Where you have to sit

in this break room and watch this bullshit and work this demeaning job.

And then once you take it out of there and you put it in front of an audience

or you know, even a small audience, a dorm room or something, it's like, I

don't know, you feel like you're taking some power back or something, you know?

Yes.

It's like, haha, I'm laughing at you.

I stole your tape.

And, right.

Well, and also like your love of the Onion and, and satire, and this is sort

of like a way of, of like you're on the outside of the entertainment industry,

being from like a small town in Wisconsin.

Yeah.

And this is almost like a way to like make fun of it or something too.

Right?

Like to comment on it from the outside.

Hundred percent.

Yeah.

Yes.

Exactly.

It's empowering in a way, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

We knew that train video inside and out.

We had the whole thing memorized and I think it was like, it was when I

was working at the film rental house, I was like, let's, let's shoot one.

'cause we had this old Matic

Yeah.

Deck uhhuh.

We were

like, we can shoot it on Matic three quarter inch.

We can use these old cameras so that it looks authentic.

Yeah.

And let's just write a script, our own script for a. Fake gas

station called Gas and Fuel Fuck.

And we borrowed some parts from the McDonald's train video and, but we,

we made a 30 minute train video.

Wow.

We got really ambitious, which turned out to be way too long.

Yeah, that's way too long.

Yeah.

But that's still got into South by,

so then we screened it for a few people and we could just

kind of tell like, all right.

Yeah.

The joke's over 10 minutes in.

Yeah.

So I re-edited it down to like eight minutes.

Okay.

And then I got it to South by Southwest.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that really came from the McDonald's training video.

Yeah.

Um, that we'd been watching since high school, I think.

By the way, I'm looking at you.

And also, it's really hard to like make eye contact because you have

an enormous Bart Simpson mask right.

Over your

Yeah.

Some guy was at an estate sale upstate.

He, he emailed us and he was like, do you guys want this?

And we're like, of course.

Of course we do.

Yeah.

It goes nicely with your nacho chihuahua, the movie.

Yeah.

I mean, there's so much stuff in here to look at.

I know.

Like your baby camera

people send us stuff at this point.

Bubba Smith's workout video.

Yep.

Oh my goodness.

The Rent A friend original video companion, the Star

Wars holiday special.

There is like the original bootleg.

Wow.

We got, I wanna be a mul killer autographed by Jeff Holper.

Well now you're just showing off

guilty as Charge.

Uh, what is this break room picture over here?

That's, um, shall we have

Kaitlyn McGirk from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum in Columbus?

Okay.

I mean, speaking of archives, they, you know, their stuff is like, you

know, Beatle, Bailey, Ken, wow.

Like Blondie, all these old, and so that woman in the picture is

holding up a picture of Kathie.

I don't remember what the story was, but I remember seeing that photo and

telling Caitlyn that I loved it because I think that's the creator of Hagar,

the horrible on the wall behind her.

Hagar the horrible, and I was, I love this picture.

It's in a break room.

Oh, it's so little good at it.

There's just so much happening.

She's

wearing a fanny pack.

It's all

brown.

So Caitlyn blew that up and put it in a frame for me.

It's

really incredible.

Yeah.

My favorite photos of all time.

What do you think, like what do you

think of when you look at that photo?

Um, oh, I, I don't know.

I think of a lot of stuff.

I, a lot of times I'll try to piece together the story, you know, like what's.

What's happening?

Why are they all here?

What, yeah.

Led them to this point.

But then also there's some nostalgia just like having to go to a stupid

meeting and having somebody stand there.

Uh, and also just the weirdness of why do you have the creator of

Hagar the horrible, I don't know.

I just kind of, I guess I'm maybe look, uh, at it more like trying

to find the comedy and everything.

Yes.

Yeah.

There's a lot of comedy to find in this one

for sure.

Yes.

So for the people who are listening and not watching this, there's a

woman standing in what is very, obviously like a corporate break

room, holding up a hand drawn picture of the cartoon character Kathy.

And there's three elderly, or like middle-aged women with like

middle-aged Midwestern short hair.

They look like

Farside cartoons.

Don't they?

Yeah.

They play characters on the far side

and they're all looking intently with their hands full on the table at this

woman who's holding up this picture.

And then behind her, she

has a fanny pack too.

Did you say that?

Oh, yeah.

No, I haven't said she's wearing a bright white fanny pack.

The woman who's holding up the Kathy, uh, cartoon, and then behind

her is a framed headshot of who Joe is telling me is I guess the

man who created Hagar the horrible.

Yeah.

Or, or high and Lois, or maybe, I don't know.

He, he did one of 'em.

Maybe he

did.

He looks very serious.

Think it's Dick Brown and very tan.

Yeah.

And he has shock white hair.

Yeah.

And he looked, I mean, and that could be like the CEO of a Yeah.

Of a like faceless, nameless corporation.

Right.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's a great

photo.

I

mean, this office is full of that kind of stuff of just like things that are

funny, that are inadvertently funny.

Well, that's, that's what I love about it, is that there's a

million stories on these tapes.

Yeah.

You know, and, and a lot of the people are still alive out there Uhhuh.

And so sometimes we get obsessed with a particular video and,

and I wanna know more about him.

Yeah.

We'll just do like a, you know, just a simple Google search and be like,

oh, that guy lives in New Jersey.

Oh, I'm gonna run over there next weekend.

Right.

And just do a short interview with him and see if, so that's what I've been

doing since we started doing this.

We try to track down a lot of the people in these videos.

Yeah.

Because they, you know, they wanted to get this thing out into the world.

Right.

And whether they did or not, they still.

Yeah, like the attention.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, oh, this thing is finally getting some legs.

Like Renta Friend is a great example of that.

Yeah.

He got a lot of attention for it right when it came out and then it just kind

of fizzled out and then we found it.

And then there's this whole new, you know, renaissance of Renta friend

and he started reselling it and Wow.

Yeah.

Rent a friend was, uh, this tape that we found at, a Thrift store.

It was still in the shrink wrap when we found it.

And the idea was that if you were a lonely person in 1987 and you had

a VCR, this guy on the tape, Sam, he would be your virtual friend.

Wow.

So he sits there and he asks you questions for 45 minutes.

It's one continuous take.

He asks you questions and he leaves a pause for you to answer.

And then he has this conversation back and forth.

And then he talks about his personal life.

Oh my God.

Tells you stuff, asks you questions about your family.

That's crazy.

Crazy.

Yeah.

It was

crazy and and wild to think that now 20 years later, there is such a thing

as like AI friends and this is like, he was just way ahead of his time.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and Rent A Friend are a real thing too.

Like you can rent a friend to like, there's actually a great documentary that

some other filmmaker did on Rent A Friend.

Really?

Yeah.

Kind of like a Winnebago man style story where like they go and they find

the guy and tell that I should send it

to you.

It's really good.

Yeah.

I don't know if I just got a, an early cut, like the

credits weren't even done yet.

Yeah.

I'm always skeptical, you know, of like, how are people

gonna make this interesting?

This filmmaker found a really interesting take.

Yeah.

On, on the renter front thing, and he has like a arc and he

has a surprise in the middle.

I'll send it to you.

Cool.

Okay.

Yeah, it's really fun.

Well, well to get back to, to your documentary career, so it's so

easy to get sidetracked in here.

Okay.

So you guys premier at South by, and you have spent all your own money.

You quit your jobs.

Yeah.

So then, but at this point you have already started the found footage festival

Yeah.

Right.

To, to help pay for it.

So then Well, we, we didn't do it to help pay for it at first.

I've been wanting to do it since I, I moved to New York in 2003 and

there were all these venues popping up that you could just, you could do

showcases in the back of like a bar.

So there's this one called Raffi.

In the, I think it was East Village or Lower East Side.

And I remember seeing a show there and being like, oh, we

could do something like this.

Yeah.

We just, and so, uh, Nick talked to somebody, he was

like, can we rent this out?

And we already had cut some clips that we, you know, Nick worked at Letterman,

so he got a lot of funny, weird videos.

He was a researcher, so if Arnold Schwarzenegger was on,

they'd find an old embarrassing video of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Right, right.

Play it.

So he had a lot of tapes.

I had a lot of tapes from the video duplication house, so, yeah.

I already had some stuff cut for my tape trading thing that I started.

Yeah.

So I was like, let's just put together all these short clips.

Right.

And charge 10 bucks at the door Uhhuh and called the, came up with the found footage

festival, which is a title I kind of hate.

If you had to do

over, what would

you name it now?

I'd call it VCR Party.

Okay.

Yeah.

The

name of your

YouTube show.

Yeah, exactly.

I think VCR parties.

Better, although young people don't know what VCRs are, but that's true.

But Found footage is strangely enough, the name of a horror genre and app.

Not when we named it that though.

Right, right.

It's like our production company, the Bear.

Yeah.

Like at the time it was so strange and you know, it was, it came

from sheer nicknames, like my childhood nickname, or some family

friends would call me Benny Bear.

And then my business partner, Barrant, his name means bold as a bear in German.

Oh.

So when we were naming our production company, we were like, oh, the Bear.

Right.

We got that in common.

And it was kind of like a cool, like, what does that mean?

Yeah.

How, and that was 20 years ago, and then five years ago, a show

comes out with the same name.

Yeah.

You guys had impossible to Google now.

Right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, it was already difficult before, if you would look at the Bayer media, yeah.

You'd get a entirely different work sample.

Well, if you added a second R at the end.

Yeah, the bear.

Oh, like five Rs,

you any Rs?

Yeah.

That's too many rss.

But anyways, yes.

But I think in a way we both came up with the perfect name.

Yeah.

And we're stuck with a mini, so we're stuck with it.

You as

well like change it.

Yeah.

We thought about changing it, but it's like, no, we can't.

Yeah, you can't now.

But people get confused because, yeah.

I found Footage Fest.

Found footage is a genre of horror movies now.

Right.

Which, when we named it in 2004, it wasn't

that.

No.

Nobody's ever heard of that.

Yeah.

And, and the show's not really a festival.

It's a 90 minute show, so.

Right.

You know that better of the alliteration.

So you guys are liars

basically?

A hundred percent.

What?

Yeah.

Okay.

So you do your first show, so you decided like, Hey, let's do a live show.

Let's charge money at the door.

Yep.

Did you have any aspirations to want to be a comedian or a performer

or?

I think not, but maybe there was something in the back of me that, I don't know.

I, like attention, but I'm also terrified by it.

So in the early days, I was really, I was just a bundle of nerves.

But I did love these videos and I did love the feeling of showing them

to people and having them laugh.

Sure.

That was a great feeling.

And so when we did it for this audience, oh man.

It was just, it was so terrifying to like, I'm new to New York too.

Wow.

So New York's still kind of scary.

Yeah.

And these people come to the show.

There's maybe, I don't know, it seats like 25 people.

And you know, we had all seats taken and people hadn't seen

the Jack Rebny video before.

Right.

People hadn't seen any of my industrial safety videos.

Yeah.

And people were doubled over laughing.

I remember one guy, like gasping for air while watching Jack Rebny.

Wow.

He'd never seen it before.

Yeah.

And, and we were like, oh, I think we're onto something.

Yeah.

And we just made a bunch of money.

Not a bunch of money, but like 250 bucks probably Right from the door, right.

That we could put into our documentary.

Right.

So we did that.

We, we booked some more shows after that.

We got an offer from some places on the west coast in La M Bar,

and then the place up in Seattle.

So we're like, let's do a West Coast tour.

So that summer we kind of refined the show a little bit.

We burned some DVDs.

Yeah.

And we were gonna sell merch along the way.

And we started up in Seattle and we worked our way down the West coast to.

San Diego eventually.

Wow.

And yeah, it was like a two week tour.

Cool.

What were we, 27 years old or So it's like being in a band.

It was so exciting.

It was, it was, it was really exciting.

And uh, and we

made

money

too.

And had the movie come out at this point had Dirty Country.

We were still working on it.

So

working

on it.

Yeah.

Okay.

We didn't finish that until 2007.

So at this time we're still shooting the documentary, following up

with Larry and doing found footage shows at about the same time.

And then taking all the money that we made from these shows and

putting it into the documentary.

And so the movie comes out, it wins audience award it south by.

Yep.

And then what happens to the movie after that?

Yeah.

You know, like we did a bunch of other film festivals.

You know, it, it's a movie that doesn't have a lot of mass appeal

'cause these songs are, are filthy.

There's a lot of heart to it.

Yeah.

But you know, the one, one of our producers on it didn't tell his

parents at all that he was working.

And I was like, I think we were talking about, you know.

Talking about our parents and like, oh, have your parents seen it yet?

And he is like, my parents have no idea I'm working on this.

Right.

Yeah.

So, you know, the songs are really gross and dirty.

So we went straight to DVD, we promoted it through our found footage channels.

Yeah.

And did you make

enough money back to pay for the making of it?

Who

knows?

I don't know.

I mean, at this point we're still selling the DVD.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, we finished the documentary without, we, we had one producer come in.

I think he dropped $15,000 for all the post-production stuff.

Okay.

I don't even know if everybody got paid back or, I don't know how.

'cause we make.

150 bucks a year off of Dirty Country at this point.

Right.

We just mix it in with all of our other stuff.

Sure, sure.

But it served as like a calling card for you guys as like you are

sort of comedy archeologists almost.

Yeah.

Like you kind of find these like strange comedic artifacts.

Yeah.

And you find the stories behind them.

Yeah.

Well, but at the time we were just, we were on found footage, festival volume

one, and we were like, I don't know if, you know, maybe this is all we got in us.

Yeah.

You know, but then while we were touring, we started finding more tapes.

At that point people were getting rid of their VHS tapes at thrift stores and

we were finding other stuff than people were bringing stuff that we would like.

Yeah.

That they, they knew our sensibility.

And then we did volume two and.

That was another hit that would and would like, the shows were

getting bigger at that point.

And then we always thought like, well this is probably it now.

'cause like, you know, when you start with like Jack Rebny and

these insurance videos and it's just like, where do we go from here?

How are we ever gonna find better stuff?

Right.

But we did.

Yeah.

We But you can't envision it while you're doing it.

Sure.

You know, you don't see that coming,

which is a good life lesson.

Like you just kind of keep going towards the thing that you're

curious about and interested in.

Yeah.

And trust that it's gonna work.

Yeah.

And then here we are 20 years later standing surrounded completely.

Yeah.

Like, we can't even hardly move around.

Like when, when I said like, let's do this in your office, I was imagining us like

going around in circles and kind of No.

You're like, you can hardly move around in here.

Yeah.

There's so many VHSs.

No, I mean, we're still waiting for our ship to come in, you know, like

we're, we're paycheck to paycheck here.

Nick takes part-time jobs.

I'm a hundred percent in on this.

Yeah.

And I, I've had a lot of times think about it and I, and I like that.

Yeah.

I like that.

Keeps me scrappy.

Keeps me hustling.

Right.

You know, we come up with dumb ideas to try and make a few more bucks.

Like we, we started, I, I think I told you, we, um, started getting rid of our

doubles as VHS of the month club, you know, so things like, we had to hustle.

We started a streaming service called Rewind o where we're showing, we put up

all of our stuff, our live shows and some orphan films, and it's curated by us.

And yeah, we have to be scrappy, but I, I just.

Everything.

Every, every day is something new and

Sure.

You know,

well, but that's also like what it takes to be a documentary filmmaker too.

Right?

You need to be scrappy.

You need to like, that's

always my advice whenever I'm on panels for at film festivals or something,

or like, that's always my go-to thing.

It's like you have to be willing to sleep on couches.

Mm. You know?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Especially in the world's documentaries.

Yeah.

There's not a lot of money in the world of document.

No.

So you have to, you have to actually love it and be willing to sleep on a floor.

Like I slept on Nick's floor for a full year while we were editing.

Dirty country.

Wow.

Yeah.

Did you mess your back up or you No, I, I had, I, I figured out this

position that was actually comfortable.

Yeah.

I, I had a cot and I hated setting it up every single night and

making the bed, so I was like, I'm just gonna sleep on the floor.

Yeah.

And I figured out this like, almost like a tripod position with my feet,

where I like put one foot here and there and I could just be relaxed Uhhuh

and I'd fall asleep in that position.

It worked every single night.

Wow.

Look, see the, and you force you to be scrappy, be creative, come

up with alternate solutions.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

I want you to show me some greatest hits here from the office.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well.

Like I said, half the collection's here, but the greatest hit shelf is right here.

Are you gonna get the uh, yes.

Here, I'll

give the shots.

So which one are you going for?

Well, all these are fantastic.

You got Whiskers the Cat with Magical Attitude.

You got Tics Stack of Colorful Asses.

I mean these, these are from like very early on.

Found footage shows stuff that we, I recognize in the past.

Baby Rapper.

Yeah.

Here.

Dance Along.

Sing along to Beatles songs with baby rapper.

Wow.

No idea who that video's for.

Yeah, that makes Just because like Beatles fans probably wouldn't like it.

No, fans would not like it.

No.

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense.

Even baby fans wouldn't like No.

Is videos for nobody.

You got Jingle Cats back here.

I'm going to ask you to do a documentary about the creator of Jingle Cats.

There's somebody watching somebody.

Please do one on Mike Spaa.

Mike

Spaa

Here.

Let's pull this one out.

This guy see is a pioneer, but he's also very reclusive.

He's a genius.

See, this is back to your whole

cat fixation here.

So Jingle Cats is like, fixation Is is like Katz singing Jingle Bell

or

like

Christmas carol's.

Yeah.

Over in front of a green screen.

And he really, he's a pioneer for like internet cats too.

But he is also a very serious person.

He's not like a goofy, weird, like he's an artist, huh?

I don't know if he's an artist, but he treats, he treats us like art.

He

thinks he is an artist.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

I mean, I would say he's an artist.

Absolutely.

But like, he started off with Jingle Dogs, which was a hit.

It was like on cassette tapes.

And then he went to Jingle Cats and he did a video of it.

Then he did Jingle Babies, which I think he went a little

too far with Jingle Babies.

They were like, Hey, hey, we'll give you the cats and the dogs.

But exactly.

The babies are just really creepy.

But I reached out to him over email one time.

Because I wanted to do something with him.

And he seemed enthusiastic then all of a sudden just ghosted.

For like five years ghosted.

Heard from him.

So I don't know if maybe he died, but I didn't see any obituaries.

I saw one TV interview he did years ago.

Maybe he heard what you said about Jingle babies and he

just hasn't forgiven you guys.

I, I didn't, I I've been thinking that this whole time.

I, I wasn't actually You haven't said it.

Yeah.

I don't think he'll, he'll probably will watch this.

But

what, uh, what's

going on with Frank Worley here?

This one found out a, uh, thrift store in Milwaukee.

It's called Sing Along with Frank Worley.

And this is a VHS tape with a, a cover that's basically out of focus.

Yeah.

And Frank Worley is an older gentleman with a black cowboy hat and a bolo

tie playing an acoustic guitar.

Yeah.

And so these are all.

From Vesper, Wisconsin, small town in the middle of Wisconsin.

Okay.

And the Mastermind is this guy Bill Porter.

Mm. And so on the back there's a one 800 number.

And so we watch these and we're like, oh, this is perfect for our show.

Yeah.

Like we, we love it.

There's these songs, it's very homemade, A lot of green screen.

Yeah.

And, uh, so you called this guy, so called that one 800 number and

they picked up and they've been like 20 years since they put these out.

Turns out they had like 10 more in this collection Wow.

Of the, of these tapes.

And I was like, oh, I want 'em all.

They're like, go to our website and order 'em.

But they were still selling them for like, you know, 1992 prices.

Right.

There was still like $25 a tape, but I was like, I need all of 'em.

So it's the most we ever spent on a series of tapes.

I think we have all of them right here.

Wow.

Yeah.

Oh, here's all of 'em.

We got all of 'em.

But we had to spend $25 on this tape and they,

they're all starring Frank Worley.

Yeah.

So then I went up there and I met Frank Worley and I met Bill

Porter, the mastermind behind it.

Sat down and had an interview with him and I was like.

Who did you sell this to?

Like who, who was the audience for this?

He was like, oh, you,

no, it wasn't me.

It was, uh, nursing homes.

Oh yeah.

He was, he's, he's told me that nursing homes ate it up.

That they would wear up the tapes.

They would listen to it so often.

Geez.

So we wrote a song for Frank Worley to perform for us for a found footage show.

And, and he did.

He did.

And I think he died a few months later.

He was like right at the end.

Oh, so you killed Frank Worley with your

baby with, with my fantastic lyric writing.

That's my question.

Kill.

Yeah.

The song was too beautiful.

It was, it was too much.

Yeah.

So yeah, he's another interesting guy.

That guy up there.

He has a studio.

I think he's a former cinematographer for like news.

Yeah, like TV news.

We had all this equipment, but he built this studio out

out of this like potato barn.

Wow.

Would green screen.

He had reindeer on his farm and he would put reindeer in front

of green screens and Oh my gosh.

Christmas movies with it, you may have some of his stuff is just insane.

Yeah.

Wow.

And well that's, uh, speaks to the weirdos that you love.

Yeah.

And what's his VHS tape of erotic women?

Right.

Oh, that's a, that's a classic.

So it has one scene.

So we've, these are a demo a dozen for us.

You know, like erotic women, we very rarely watch 'em.

'cause you know what, you're gonna get one.

Yeah.

There's like one

nude bowling nude.

Yes.

Wrestling nude.

Exactly.

Nude everything.

Yeah.

Nude, nude barbecue where they're eating barbecue naked.

Wow.

Two things you don't need to put together.

No, it doesn't work either.

Yeah.

It didn't work for me.

Yeah.

But erotic women, they have a, a section where they do profiles on the

erotic women and some of their hobbies.

There's one scene in there where a woman says her hobby is painting ceramic clowns.

And so she's half naked and she's painting a ceramic clown.

And this just the shot and what she's saying.

I declared it to be the greatest moment in VHS history, like it was

the pinnacle of VHS for me, of this half naked woman in, in lingerie, very

seriously painting a ceramic clown.

wow.

Yeah.

It's like the highs and the lows.

How are you gonna

top that ever?

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah.

And so we recently, we were in Portland, Oregon.

I,

I was gonna say Nacho Chihuahua.

The movie probably comes close.

Well, not, that's a whole other story.

So there's Guy, oh,

sorry.

But well, I interrupted you.

You were in Portland, Oregon.

Portland,

Oregon.

We were at, uh, movie Madness.

Have you been there before?

No.

Oh, it's incredible.

Okay.

The video store there and they, the guy also has all this movie memorabilia.

I think he worked in the industry and he has like the David Lynch ear there.

Oh wow.

It's one of the best video stores of all time.

And they always save tapes for us whenever we're in town.

Cool.

And he gave us erotic women too.

Oh no, there's a sequel.

Yeah, there's a sequel.

Is she

still painting clowns?

No,

but there's another one in there where a woman describes her job at an Italian deli

and give into deep detail about the menu.

It's like we got meatballs.

We got one called a Giuseppe combo.

We got, uh.

Yeah.

She goes into all the sandwiches on the menu.

Oh my.

It's not as good as the painting, the ceramic clown, but it's pretty good.

Oh, Harvey, Sid Fisher, he's another guy.

I who I,

I know Harvey, Sid Fisher.

Everybody knows

Harvey.

Sid Fisher.

Yeah.

He made, uh, a bunch of astrology.

He made songs out of, uh, astrological signs.

Right.

Performed them in sort of like a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin,

like sort of classic crooner.

Yep.

Style.

And then weirdly got women to come in and be background dancers in

costume, like interpretive dancers.

Yeah.

So dress like if it's Leo, there's a woman dressed as a lion, doing like

an interpretive dance in the back.

And it was all like public access.

Right.

Right.

It was Los Angeles Public Access, and it was one of those tape traded videos too.

And that is a scene that didn't make it into chop and steel.

When you go golfing with Harvey, Sid Fisher,

why didn't I make it in there?

I remember that being fun.

It was fun.

And it was, I almost hit a hole in one

on that.

Oh, I don't remember that part.

Oh, I remember it.

I thought that I had hit a hole in one.

I was like, oh my God, this is gonna be,

I remember that.

He was, the whole thing was surreal and really fun and funny, but it just

didn't kind of, it, it didn't fit.

There's no place to, there was no place it, it didn't really like

further any part of the story.

Right.

Necessarily.

I want that footage though.

Okay.

Because he's a crusty guy.

He is.

He was crusty.

Then beat

him.

You, you just.

You dive in headfirst with Harvey s Fisher.

He has no off switch, no filter.

Yeah.

No code switching.

Yeah.

You know how like, you know

Yeah.

Some people like put it on for the camera.

He is not.

Yeah, he's Harvey.

Sid Fisher all the time.

Yeah.

He's kinda like the dude.

Like Lebowski.

Yeah.

I remember one time he showed up to our dirty country screening.

I invited him to it and he showed up.

He was actually wearing a robe and he had little airplane bottles of booze.

Oh boy.

Pockets.

Oh my gosh.

And, and he fell asleep during dirty cut.

I was sitting right next to him.

Thanks a lot Harvey.

Sid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he always has like booze, like tuck his golf cart.

Do a documentary on, on Harvey, Sid Fisher's golf cart, because it's a

memorial to all of his dead friend

that's very niche.

He

goes, he goes, do you wanna use Shelly Val's putter?

He goes, this, I got this from, uh, Shelly Deval, her daughter,

when she died, she gave it to me.

He goes, this is just like a, a memorial for all the,

we always named the episodes based on a phrase that the guest

says, and I think yours is gonna be called Shelly Duval's Putter.

I think that's a good one.

Yeah.

I think we

think we just found our episode title.

I keep looking at this growing pains poster.

Signed poster behind you.

Yeah.

Tell me about this.

Okay, so we had an intern last year to help us get everything organized.

Uhhuh just a long story, but uh, his dad is a friend of ours

too, and his dad had this and.

It was taking up space.

There's not a lot of room in New York City.

A lot of people don't have storage.

It's a big poster.

It's a big poster and has all the autographs of the groin, pan Pans cast.

And his dad wanted to give it to Nick because he knew that Nick loved the show.

Groin Pans.

Yes.

So he took it from his apartment in Brooklyn, took it up to Queens on the, on

the subway and his son Luke, our intern.

14 years old, 15 years old.

Shot a documentary of that trip.

Oh wow.

And this kid, you should have him on the show.

This kid's going places.

His dad, you know, of course it's like a funny thing of like his

dad carrying this subway and the interactions with people on the show.

Sure.

People saying, what's that?

Him explaining, oh, I got this all signed of, even it's my friend Nick.

Maybe we can give a a link in the show description to this

if it lives online somewhere.

I don't know if it lives online.

We showed it on our show on our Tuesday night VCR Party show.

Uhhuh.

I don't know if he uploaded it or what, but, but it's also like.

What, what does this mean to you?

Like Right, the kid was asking the right questions.

Yeah.

You know, he was asking his dad like, why, why are you giving this up?

I thought you liked this.

And so it got a little deeper than just like this quirky,

I'm taking it from point A to,

I love it.

I love it

kid.

I'm telling you, invest in this kid.

He's going places.

You know, we did a morning news show with him too.

Oh.

This is the intern that's, oh, I, okay.

I love this.

So you were, you and Nick were pranking local morning news shows.

That's a big part of the movie that we made together.

Chop Steele You guys have since stopped doing that since you got sued

in federal court Over these pranks.

Yeah.

But now you're new intern.

Is pranking morning news shows.

Well,

after we finished Chop Steele I thought, you know what, let's just

retire from these morning news shows.

You made a documentary about us.

We won the lawsuit.

You know, we settled.

Yeah.

Got everything that we wanted.

We got all this attention.

Let's go out on top.

Yeah, let's just call it quits.

And then, I dunno, we just saw that twinkle in Luke's eyes, our

intern and he, he came to one of the chopping steel screenings.

Yeah.

He asked a question during the, at Tribeca.

He asked, uh, he goes, do you guys need an intern at at that?

No, I don't remember that.

And he raised his hand and said, do you guys need an intern?

I was like, yes, we do.

Oh, I was like, well board.

Wow.

And so we saw that documentary he made about the growing pains cast and you

know, and he loved chopping steel.

And I had an idea for writing up a press release for him.

Yeah.

Saying that he was a teen lecturer who went around to schools.

Teaching kids about ways to get off of their screens.

Yeah.

And we called it Teens Against Screens.

Yeah.

And, which is a great name.

Yeah.

Sent out a press release to just a couple places, got a hit back, they're

still not doing their research at all.

And Grand Rapids, Michigan, we got 'em on a morning news show.

Oh.

And the idea, the premises, he goes on with these ideas for

getting kids off screens, but they're all related to sticks.

Do logs

of like how, how you can have fun doing things with sticks and logs,

nature.

So that was the idea was like getting back to nature.

But it's all stuff like throwing sticks at a pine cone and like

using logs to smash in a bill wafer.

You know, just ridiculous stuff that doesn't make sense.

Oh my gosh.

And they hit 'em on for nine minutes.

Wow.

And, and I was like, that's the way to do it.

Yeah.

A kid do it.

Yeah.

They don't question the kid.

They questioned us.

Is chop of steel all the time.

Right.

Well you guys didn't look like strong men.

Not at all.

Huh?

You, I'm sorry to break the news to you, but Yeah, you and Nick

don't look like bodybuilders.

No.

But a kid shows up and they just, they assume the best.

So is this now part of your found footage?

Show

our volume 11.

We include it.

That's, yeah.

Yeah.

So sir. Okay.

We're gonna put a link to that in the show.

Show me one or two more things and then uh, we'll do our lightning round fits.

Yes.

Okay.

Memorial Day 2000.

This was, uh, featured in our first volume.

Are you familiar with this?

Yes, I've seen this.

This is a handmade VHS uh, cape cover of a guy.

It's a black and white photo.

A guy's, uh, bare ass is hanging out of his pants.

It looks like he's covered in mud.

Yep.

There's a lot of mud fights

and there's like a whole lot of text on the back.

Yeah.

Somebody wrote an awful lot about this tape.

Well, yeah.

We fund the atomic books in Baltimore.

Okay.

It was for sale there, but it was one of those like kind

of self distributed things.

The found magazine.

We heard about it through the found magazine guys.

Yeah.

Davey Rothbart.

Uhhuh.

Yeah.

And, uh, but it was one of his friends found it at a garage sale in Kalamazoo

and it's just a debauch weekend.

I remember.

It's kinda like Lord of the Flies.

It's like fireworks and guns and everybody's drunk

and it's just such a great like time capsule.

2000. Yeah.

It almost feels like the Woodstock 99.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

It was around the time of Woodstock 99.

Yeah.

Which was that, you know, one where like

it was, the toilets were overflowing and nobody could get water.

And it's that,

it's basically that, but just on a much smaller level and,

and again, great slice of life.

I think the original tape was two hours long.

Somebody shaved it down to 30 minutes.

We made like a three minute cut for our show.

Wow.

And then we heard that all the people in it are school teachers from Kalamazoo.

Oh my God.

I don't think they were happy about it.

Getting out there in the world.

So,

yeah.

'cause they're not like teaching fourth graders and Right.

Yeah.

Having current teacher conferences.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And you could kind of tell they were a little bit responsible, but not really.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

All right.

So show me, show me the, your last greatest hits here.

Here's this

one.

How to have cybersex on the internet.

Ooh.

This was, this was one of our first videos that blew up online.

Wow.

I made like a three minute edit and uploaded it, Uhhuh, and it's put

out by this company called Simar.

And uh, I also, I just love how redundant it is, how to

have cyber sex on the internet.

An attempt to be in an instructional video.

Yeah.

And what year is that from?

I think it was like maybe 99.

Let's see what the year is on it.

It's like right when the internet was coming out.

The thing that I love about Simar, which again.

Great fodder for a documentary Simar.

We have tons of cinema guitars.

Yeah.

They had their finger on the pulse of fads, like as soon as a new fad

would come out, like rollerblading?

Yeah.

Or whatever.

They shed out a video immediately all about it.

Oh yeah.

How to do it.

Which Simar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was quantity over quality, and so the internet was just coming

out and they're like, okay, let's show people how to have cyber sex.

You know what's interesting about that is I went to undergrad at the University

of Kansas, and I didn't know this until going to school there, but there had

been a film studio in Lawrence, Kansas, which was smack dab in the middle of

the country between New York and la.

And it was called Old Father Studios.

And the guy who ran it, Charlie old father, made all these old 16 millimeter

films that were basically like this.

They were like, but they would show 'em at high schools and it would be like, how

not to be a snob or like personal hygiene.

Yeah.

Or things like that.

And then, and you know, high schools would buy them by the,

was this the dozens, 15 millimeter, like sixties?

Like, yeah.

Yeah.

So

this is like the sixties into the seventies.

And then famously he made a low budget horror movie that is on the, on criterion

collection called Carnival of Souls.

That was shot all in Lawrence and around there, but he was making money and had

this huge building with a, a psych wall and light grid and like a real studio.

Yeah.

But it was from making these like industrial bizarre

niche, like high school films

basically.

I have a lot of, uh, training videos and safety videos and stuff.

Yeah.

And some of them are really well done.

Yeah.

Like some of the, like their effects, they'll show like a hand

getting smashed in a industrial wood chopper or something, and.

I swear some of them had to have been directed by like John

Carpenter or somebody, you know,

because a lot, I just wonder that, well, a lot of times I feel like these

guys probably went to la like, you know, got trained and then had kids and

realized like, oh, we wanna be back home closer to the grandparents or whatever.

But they don't want to give up the dream of making movies, and

so they figure out how to do the thing that the community needs Yeah.

In that little town, and probably

get paid way more than they would for these B movies.

Yeah.

You know, like Yeah.

Yeah.

In these industrial videos with a big corporation paying on.

Right.

Well, and now kus Film School is, was in the old Charlie, old father building.

Right.

So he like, you know, the, he gave the building to the university and

that's where I took film classes.

Yeah.

And learned how to become a filmmaker.

And so it's like, in a way, he kind of passed along the, even

though he had to make things that were probably not his dream.

Right.

He still kept the dream alive and then passed it passed the torch.

Okay.

Which is pretty cool.

You?

Yeah.

That's great.

Yeah.

So maybe these guys did the same thing.

Oh, I'm sure.

This is the one that really, just one more and then we can move on.

But this is the one that really, that Nick and I started.

Nick had this, it's

called Mr. T's Be Somebody, and it's a cover of Mr. T wearing all his

regalia, his gold chains, his mohawk, and there's fireworks going off behind

him, and he is smiling right into the camera, giving a big Okay sign.

Yeah.

It's called Mr. T's.

Be somebody or be somebody's fool.

It's like a, a positive message to kids and what you can

do and being a good person.

It's a, it's an uplifting video, but we thought it was

the funniest thing in like 1994.

Yeah.

Their senior year of high school, we would pop this in all the time.

Sure.

We had all these running commentaries and that.

That was one of the very first ones.

So that

and the McDonald's training video

were about the same time.

Yeah.

And then there was a public access show that we loved at the time.

Yeah.

And it was all, it was those three.

Those are the big three.

So what do you love about what makes bad things good?

Because in a way you could say like, all these tapes are bad.

Like they kind of miss the mark and like they're not, you know,

like Chihuahua or Nacho Chihuahua.

The movie was probably trying to be Yeah.

Like a good movie.

Yeah.

And it is widely considered to not be a good movie.

Yeah.

But you guys have found it.

Love it.

And so what is it that to you makes it great when other people could look

at it and think that it's terrible?

My number one favorite movie of all time is American Movie.

Yeah.

And it's because it's inspiring to me every time I watch it, because it's a

guy with very little resources trying to make an ambitious horror movie.

Right.

With his friends.

Yeah.

And that, I like the story behind, like the movie Covin.

I watched it recently and I was like, you know, uh, okay.

But I like the story, or trying to figure out the story behind, behind the things.

So you, you almost don't look at the product, you think

about the people who made the

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're down to like the, the graphic design for the cover.

Mm-hmm.

You know, just like, mm-hmm.

Uh, it'll be a really low budget video, but their cover will be like, oh, this

looks like it is like, oh, they must have put all their budget into the.

Design of the cover.

Right.

And then the best part is when you can actually track down these people

and find out the real story behind it.

Yeah.

'cause you know, while I'm watching it, I'm always trying to,

I, I'm coming up with theories.

How did they get to this point?

I will never shit on like a b movie, you know?

Yeah.

Like, people are just like, oh, it's terrible.

It's like, no, making a a feature link movie is hard.

So hard.

Yeah.

Even if it's the worst piece of shit in the world.

Right.

Even if it's, if it's over an hour and you've dedicated that much time to

gathering people and costumes and props and editing and then post-production.

Yeah.

That's a herculean effort.

It really is.

Yeah.

And so I will never shit on that, but I usually don't really enjoy watching.

B movies, right.

Like it are usually just seeing one you see in 'em.

All right.

But I love hearing the stories behind 'em.

Yeah.

I love the interviews from the filmmakers and,

but in a lot of cases, these aren't b movies.

Like these are remnants of a time, you know, like, like tics.

Right, right.

It is like, that's, that's about like the workout craze that happened.

In the nineties around VHS culture.

Yeah.

And like,

well, well around Jean Fonda's workout more and she sold like

8 million copies or something.

Is that right?

And so there were all

these copycats

and that's, everybody came See that, that's what I like.

I I like the cultural trends of it all.

Why, why did we do that?

Why did everybody want do that?

But then I also like the outliers is just like, why did that person

make that one video in, in as, as they were mentally ill or, right.

Are they an artist who had this vision

or like this, like this sip and strip cup collection, which is like,

it looks like tumblers with like women who are sort of scantily clad.

Yeah.

Looking at you while you have a glass of juice.

I guess I don't, for

one thing that isn't is nostalgia.

I, I get kind of bored with nostalgia.

Mm. So this

isn't like a celebration of like the nineties or something?

No,

I, I mean, I. I'm a laugher, like I come from a laughing family.

Yeah, a family that really just makes fun of everything.

So when I see these videos, that's my first thing is to find the comedy in them.

I love it, you know?

But then.

I don't know, ask questions like, how did it come to be?

And you're like, a, this person down,

you're like a comedy archeologist.

Yeah.

Or something.

Oh, that's a good way of putting it.

Yeah.

I'm gonna put that on my business card.

I

like it.

You're like the Indiana Jones of uh Oh,

that's even better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because you, 'cause you, like, again, like you said, you're thinking

about the story and the people behind each of these artifacts.

Right, right.

And, and I carry a whip with me everywhere I,

all right.

Well here at the end of our episodes, we like to do.

We call it lightning rounds, and we're not very good at keeping these snappy,

so I'll try to, I'll try to ask them or something in a snappy way, but What

was the Gateway Drug documentary for you where you were like, I wanna make

a documentary, I could do this too.

Probably American movie.

That was the one that I, I got a bootleg copy of it.

And

this is the film by Chris Smith, that's about Mark Bors and Mike Shank.

And they're making a low budget horror movie in Wisconsin.

Yep.

Right?

Yep.

And uh, it just really spoke to me and I'm from Wisconsin too.

Yeah.

So like these are guys that I went to high school with and I spoke the language

and I had the same ambition around the same time of wanting to be a filmmaker.

Yeah.

And that was the one that was like funny but also inspiring and

also you're just rooting for this guy and it's so re watchable.

I quote it daily.

Yes.

That was the big one.

What's your

gimme, gimme your favorite quote from it.

How the hell far away is this marsh Now when he is, he's looking for, he's looking

for a marsh with his mom and he goes, who the hell though is this marshal?

I say that all the time when I can't find something

That's

so good.

How the hell far away is this marshal?

It's such a Wisconsin way of saying that kid.

My buddy Lee Phelan, who is a director of photography that I worked with all

the time and have for years, he says.

We're shot every F-stop known to man.

Yes.

Yeah.

I say that all.

We'll get a hell of a lot of assistant directors saying, Hey

man, can you move back a few feet?

Oh,

the whole movie is quotable.

It's so good.

I would say the, so that one, definitely number one.

But Sherman's March was one where I was, where I was like, oh, you can do

different things with documentaries.

Yeah.

And I just loved that he started off with One direction.

Yep.

For a documentary.

He wanted to document the Sherman's March.

Was it post Civil War?

Yep.

Of

going down through the south and Yeah.

And then he'd get distracted by like, well, I'm in Raleigh.

Maybe I'll swing by my ex-girlfriend's house.

Well,

his girl, I love how it starts.

He's like, I got a grant to make this historical documentary, but

my girlfriend just broke up with me and I'm like, paralyzed about it and

I'm just gonna start filming him.

He starts filming himself.

Yeah.

And it's this like meditation on being heartbroken.

Yeah.

And then he traces Sherman's March, but he's trying to meet women the whole time.

I just, I remember seeing that thinking like, this is brilliant.

You can do other things.

Same.

I had the exact same experience.

I love that movie so much.

Okay.

We think of this show as like the show that we wish were around

when we were first starting out.

Yeah.

So what would your advice be to somebody who is maybe working on their first

documentary or interested in making a doc?

Yeah.

I mean, we kind of talk about it today, but like my, my big thing is you have

to be willing to sleep on couches.

Like you have to be willing to be broke because there's not a lot of money.

Front for this stuff.

And if you get money, great, but you're not gonna, probably not gonna get a lot.

Most people won't.

And so you have to be willing to sleep on couches and also stick with it.

Because like we had major pitfalls very early on with our first

documentary, and then we found all these other arguably better stories.

Right.

That came out of it.

But you know, we had to wait six months.

Yeah.

And you know, we used the six months to organize our footage

mm-hmm.

And

talk to our subject and to search for a new path.

I shouldn't talk though.

I have so many projects that I've.

Shot the entire thing and I haven't edited it yet.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

But I think for early ones, for your first ones, you have to finish it, right?

You have to get that under your belt.

Yeah.

So that, 'cause it's the best feeling in the

world.

Matt Wolf, the director of the Peewee Herman doc was an early

guest and that was his advice too.

It was like, finish.

Yes.

The projects that you start.

Yeah.

Because if you don't finish them, then you won't go onto the next one, basically.

Right,

right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and I have like three projects cooking right now.

Yeah.

And I just, yeah.

Well,

and let's talk about that.

'cause the last question is, what can you not stop thinking about right now?

And part of the reason I'm here in New York is to go to

a screening of your new doc.

Yeah.

So tell us about,

oh man.

This one.

So we had an editor for Found Footage Festival.

He is been with us since like volume three of the show.

Great editor.

And he stumbled across maybe 12, 13 years ago, a bucket of mini DV tapes

over at one of his friend's house.

Like a literal bucket.

Like an actual bucket.

Like that's what he told me.

And that's what I tell his people.

It always sounds weird to say, but he found a bucket of mini

dvs and he is like, what's this?

He is like, oh, I documented my family all through middle school

and high school and into college.

And Greg was like, what?

He's like, can I look at it?

So it turns out this kid was his friend from high school.

Mm-hmm.

Was an aspiring filmmaker and had a camera that he got for

Christmas and he would film.

He didn't, you know, they made funny short films out in the backyard and stuff.

Right.

But he would also, every time there was a fight in their family, the family

was, I don't wanna say dysfunctional, but maybe a little dysfunctional.

Yeah.

He would pick up the camera and he would capture that, the craziness.

Wow.

Why?

And he did that over the course of about 10 years.

Wow.

And 300 hours of footage.

Oh my gosh.

Greg spent 10 years editing this project together.

Oh my gosh.

This, it's almost like boyhood, you know, like you watch his, wow, this kid grow up.

He took 300 hours, he whittled it down to about 85 minutes

and there's no interviews with the family today.

It's all just the footage that the kid shot,

footage that the kid shot.

And it's fascinating.

What are you

guys calling it?

What's the name of it?

Uh,

we're calling it video Filmed for life.

Hmm.

At one point the mom looks at the camera, she goes, I don't

wanna be video filmed for life.

You know, she's, she's getting the word spelling, but like, yeah.

She doesn't wanna be video filmed for life.

So he is like, that's the title.

Oh, video filmed for life.

The other thing about this movie is that it's so illegal.

There's no, everybody in the, in the movie says, I don't wanna be on camera.

I don't wanna be video filmed for life.

Oh, wow.

And so we, he edited this together.

He showed it to me, I don't know, six, seven years ago.

And I was fascinated by everybody.

I was like, what are you gonna do with it?

And he is like, I don't know.

I have no idea.

He spent all this time.

He was also in his parents' basement at the time, living for several years.

Oh boy.

I don't know what his situation was at the time.

Yeah.

He was working on this project and he has this like, it's 10 years of

this and it's fascinating, but it's also like, what can we do with it?

So, right.

So found footage got involved and you guys are producers on it.

Came on as producers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we're helping out financially and with resources and we sent it out.

His finished cut, we sent out to all the major festivals,

Sundance and everything we got.

We didn't get into any, they passed.

Everybody passed.

And I think I know why, but they, we got responses back from 'em saying

this movie was mesmerizing this movie.

I can't stop thinking about it, but it just doesn't fit with the programming.

Wow.

And I kind of get why it doesn't fit with the programming, because

it's such a slice of life with no.

No guide.

It's not narrated.

Right.

You know, it's just a slice of life from like 2007 to 2016 or so.

Is there a three act structure?

Like does it feel like there's a resolution at the end?

A little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

But there's definitely, yeah, there's definitely stuff that happens

with results and consequences.

I can't wait to see this.

And you're screening it where?

So we're screening at John Wilson's theater Low Cinema.

Yeah.

And the Ridgewood Queens.

And this is John Wilson of how to with John Wilson

fan.

Yeah.

And I told him about it and he was like, absolutely.

I was like, it's, it's kind of illegal.

Uh, and, uh, we're making everybody sign NDAs beforehand,

which he, he liked that idea.

Yeah.

It's like, it's kind of a, a fun, uh, shtick.

Oh.

So I have to sign an NDAI

sign.

NDA.

Wow.

And appearance releases, but we're, we're curious as to what

everybody I send it to has loved it.

Yeah.

And I have sent it to maybe a dozen people.

Oh.

But I wanna see what.

An audience sitting in a movie theater who I don't know.

Yeah.

Thinks about it.

I have no idea how that

would and that's what we're doing tonight.

That's what we're doing tonight.

So exciting.

There's

screenings tonight.

It's a small theater.

It's like 45 seats.

Amazing.

And our lawyer Anderson, who you know Yeah.

Oh yeah.

From Chop and Steel.

From Chop and Steel is gonna get up and say some words beforehand.

Oh.

So NDA and Oh wow.

This is gonna be so good.

Yeah.

Joe, thank you for doing this.

Yeah.

Is there anything we didn't talk about that you want to cover?

Be sure to mention?

No, I think we covered it all.

I think we're good.

People can find you at found footage

footage fest.com.

Yeah.

That's all of our stuff.

Our Tuesday night shows.

Tuesday night shows.

We're trying to watch every single one of these VHS games.

Oh my God.

Watch.

Wanna Join The Journey.

And we're touring around doing our new shows and.

Come out and see us and buy some merch.

For those of you who are listening, you have to click over and actually

watch this video to see how many tapes are in this office.

Yeah, it's unbelievable to be surrounded by this.

Look

YouTube and watch how to have cyber sex on yet.

Don again, you won't be disappointed.

All right, you heard it here.

All right.

Thanks, Joe.

Thanks.

Next time on Dock Walks.

Next time

we are off the trail and heading out to the mountains of Park City, Utah City.

One more time in Park City for the Sundance Film Festivals.

We're gonna Sundance again.

I hadn't even been last year.

Now I am going back.

This is a great one-on-ones already set up and to catch the vibe of

the last Sundance as it unfolds before our eyes in Park City.

And we want you to come with us.

So come along as I'm very cold and he's.

It's very good looking.

It is very good looking question mark.

And we go to Park City.

Hey, we're gonna have three or four episodes coming to you on dock walks.

Do, do, do, do.

Dock Walks is created, produced, and edited by my friend Ben

Stein, Bower of the Bear.

Hello

and my friend Keith Maitland of Go Valley.

Thanks for

tuning in.

Follow us at Doc Walks Pod on Instagram X and YouTube.