As producer Brian Eno once said, the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records during their five-year run in the late 1960s, but everyone who bought one started a band.
They were abrasive, off-putting, and alienating — in other words, they were punk years before Lester Bangs coined the term to describe their descendants. One of the people who bought their records was a young English folk singer who performed under the name David Bowie. In 1971, he was playing the Velvets’ ode to methamphetamine “White Light/White Heat” to thousands of teenagers who were just there to hear Ziggy Stardust play “Space Oddity,” and continued to perform the song until his retirement in the early 2000s.
Clockwise from top left: Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, and Nico
Despite their broad influence, the Velvet Underground is one of the last of the 1960s rock giants to get a career-spanning documentary. Now it seems that they were just waiting for the right person to come along to tell their story. They found that in experimental filmmaker Todd Haynes — an influential cult figure in his own right — whose infamous debut “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” was told using Barbie dolls to stand in for his subjects. In I’m Not There, he rendered incidents from Bob Dylan’s life using five different actors to portray the singer, including Cate Blanchett.
Despite the fact that they owed their careers to their discovery by Andy Warhol, very few people pointed cameras at Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, and Nico. This is a problem if you’re trying to make a movie about them. Hayes blows straight past the problem by embracing the experimental film scene bubbling up in Manhattan at the same time as the Velvets’ reign of terror. While assembling the documentary Woodstock, editor Thelma Schoonmaker discovered that a great way to spice up marginally useful footage is to employ split screen. If one image of, say, a drummer playing, is boring, but it’s the only in-focus thing you have to use, pair it with another boring image and suddenly it’s interesting. Hayes takes it to the next level—at one point, I counted 12 simultaneous images in one frame. (Hayes recently told an interviewer that he licensed 2 1/2 hours of footage for the two-hour movie. The film’s list of media credits was so long it gave me a panic attack.)
A busy frame from Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground.
It all sounds disorienting, but the effect is evocative and clarifying. In the early going, you feel like you’re walking around the New York of the ’60s, looking everywhere for the strange art you heard about. By the time the Velvets hit the road with the Warhol’s revolutionary multimedia presentation, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, you feel like you’re on their wavelength, and the San Francisco hippies they shocked and appalled seem hopelessly square. Here, Haynes shows his knack for picking the perfect anecdote, such as the fact that Warhol would grab random people from the crowd to run the lights, and just before the band took the stage at San Francisco’s Fillmore theater, promoter Bob Graham hissed “I hope you bomb.” (“Then why did he book us?” wonders a still incredulous Mo Tucker.)
Lou Reed circa 1965
To say this is a “warts and all” story is an understatement. Early in the film, Lou Reed’s sister mounts an angry, pre-emptive defense against people who single out the songwriter for his legendarily copious drug use. This is the guy who wrote “Heroin,” after all. Reed grew up in an oppressive household, and when his parents discovered he was bisexual, they sent him for electroshock therapy. But nearly everyone interviewed comments on how difficult he was to work with, or just be around. Warhol’s Factory is described as being a terrible place for women, but it doesn’t seem like the snake pit of backbiting and out-of-control egos was a great place for anyone.
But without the Factory, Reed and Cale would have never been paired with Nico, the stunning German actress who gave voice to “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Femme Fatale.” To Haynes, every bit of it, good and bad and weird, contributed to the volatile mix that produced music that spoke to the outcasts, the gender nonconformists, and the depressive nerds who heard something of themselves in “Black Angel Death Song.” With Summer of Soul, The Sparks Brothers, and now The Velvet Underground, 2021 is shaping up to be a banner year for music documentaries.
The Velvet Underground is playing at Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill.
Earlier this week, I got to watch New Orleans filmmaker Randy Mack experience The Sparks Brothers live on Twitter. It went something like this:
5 min: “Hilarious Mockumentary”
10 min “Wait, is this real?”
15 min “Well-doctored vintage footage—funny!”
25 min “OK, this must be real.”
30 min “haha ‘Muff Winwood’ what a sick parody”
35 min “fuck I think it’s real?”
45 min “*head explodes*”
Yes, Randy. Sparks was, and is, a real band. They are not, as everyone inexplicably thought, British, but rather from Southern California. Brothers Ron and Russell Mael have been making music together for 50 years. Ron is a keyboard virtuoso with a deadpan scowl and a wicked sense of humor. Russell is taller, blessed with more conventional good looks, and a precisely controlled voice that can be Freddie Mercury operatic or Robert Plant screamy, according to the needs of the song. They made their recording debut in 1967 as Halfnelson with the little-heard “Computer Girl,” which got the attention of legendary prog-rock musician and producer Todd Rundgren. The reason most people think they’re from the UK is that they were discovered on the right side of the pond before they were accepted in America. In 1974, they appeared on the classic BBC show Top of the Pops to sing “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us,” and soon the song was burning up the charts.
Ron Mael with Russell dummy from a vintage music video.
It’s tough to say what Sparks sounds like, because they radically change their sound every other album, and they are reportedly now working on their 25th full length. They started out as Pink Floyd-like psychedelia, but were well-positioned to go glam because of Russel’s rock god locks and Ron’s uncanny ability to absorb new music and immediately create a synthesis that’s smarter and better than the inspiration. The biggest coup of their career was when they almost single-handedly created the synth pop branch of New Wave after hearing Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and cold-calling Italo-disco producer Giorgio Moroder. The brothers fired their band, bulked up on synthesizers and drum machines, and made the album No. 1 in Heaven. “The Number One Song in Heaven” and “Beat the Clock” became huge hits in Europe and inspired a legion of musicians to put down their guitars and make music from bloopy noises.
The Sparks Brothers is director Edgar Wright’s first documentary. The Sparks superfan is better known for his stylish, groundbreaking pop confections like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Shaun of the Dead. Wright weaponized his musical obsession in 2017 with the balletic car chase movie Baby Driver. His restless, inventive visual style fits perfectly with Sparks’ wry, heady music. His energetic editing keeps the proceedings light and eminently watchable throughout its two-hour-plus running time.
That sounds like a long movie, but there’s a lot of story to cover, and the Mael brothers, now in their seventies, are endlessly fascinating characters. Wright is not alone in the Sparks cult. They are, as the tagline goes, your favorite band’s favorite band. From Beck to Björk, Duran Duran to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, author Neil Gaiman to comedian Patton Oswalt, everyone wants to weigh in on the brilliance of the Maels.
Animated sequences fill in the gaps in The Sparks Brothers.
Sparks, while they perpetually hung around on the musical B list, made frequent television appearances in the ’70s and ’80s, which means Wright has a ton of archival footage to work with. Especially entertaining are the duo’s appearances on American Bandstand. At one point, Dick Clark asks “Who is the oldest?” to which Ron deadpans “You are.” For some of the juicier stories, which happened without cameras rolling, Wright resorts to animating the visuals. This is pretty standard for documentary recreations these days, but the director, like the band, keeps changing styles. Some of the stories are told in stop motion, while others are hand-drawn animation and CGI.
Why, exactly, Sparks were perpetual also-rans in America is a good question. Wright takes a couple of stabs at answering. Maybe it was Ron’s Hitler mustache. (It’s a Charlie Chaplin mustache, Ron would insist.) Maybe they were just too smart for the audience, or they never stuck around in the same style long enough for their following to grow beyond the loyal cult. But as the film progresses, that question becomes less and less interesting. What makes The Sparks Brothers a must-see is the brothers’ impish wit, ample charisma, and bottomless well of unique talent. And they’re still at it. In July, the musical Annette the boys wrote and scored, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, will open the Cannes Film Festival. It’s Sparks’ world; we just live in it.
Bleeding Audio won Best Music Documentary at Oxford Film Fest 2021.
For a music fan, there’s nothing more special than the one band they know and love, but that never quite made it big. For many people over the years, that band was Memphis’ Big Star. For many people who came of age in the ’00s, such as director Chelsea Christer, that band is The Matches.
Christer saw the band play an opening slot at a show in her native Colorado in 2005. “I was blown away by their performance and became an instant fan,” she recalls. “Then, when I moved to San Francisco for film school, I had a documentary project I had to do. They’re a Bay Area band, so I decided to shoot my shot and see if they’d let me do a little mini doc about them for my class project. I’ve been friends with them ever since. So when they let me know that they were going to reunite, I was already a member of the inside circle. So I was just like, ‘Hey, let me, let me help document this for you guys.’ And it just kind of snowballed from there.”
Her documentary Bleeding Audio had its world premiere at Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival in San Jose, California on March 7, 2020. “We had a little secret show afterwards, and it was the last live event that I’ve been to. It was amazing, but they announced they’re shutting down the festival the same day.”
A little more than a year later, Bleeding Audio will screen at the Oxford Film Festival’s in-person program on Saturday, March 27th, and on the festival’s virtual program throughout the month of April. Christer says the film is about more than The Matches. “I wanted to give fans the story that they didn’t know, and make a film that fans would love and appreciate. But to me, it’s always been very important to focus on a general audience and make sure that the narrative was constructed in a way that you could watch this film and whether you like The Matches, or you had no idea who they were. You could at least walk away feeling like you had enjoyed a really great story.”
The pop punk band released four albums from 1997 to 2009, and amassed a cult following with their relentless touring before succumbing to burnout. “I wanted to use their story almost like a case study to represent most artists who came up during that time,” says Christer.
During that period, digital music distribution overtook physical CD and album sales, disrupting the business model for musical acts, and tanking careers that would have been viable in the 1990s. “The Matches’ major career milestones line up, tragically, and beautifully, with how the digital age of music has played out. I found that while yes, they’re unique and they’re wonderful characters, they weren’t the only band that went through this. In our structuring and telling of the story, we wanted to make that abundantly clear that while The Matches coulda, woulda, shoulda, there were so many other bands out there that might not have the same kind of redemption story The Matches do.”
The tragedy of coulda, woulda, shouda is balanced by the punk ethos that helped the band thrive when they staged a comeback. “They always have this central focus on the community of their fans. It wasn’t rockstar-to-fan, it was always peer-to-peer. I feel like that that’s like a power that we have now, thanks to this digital leveling of the playing field. You can actually reach out to your fans and have this one-on-one relationship with them. The Matches were able to come back so strongly not just because the music stood the test of time, and they were talented, but also because they truly cared about their fan base in a way that helps emphasize the power of the community of music. You can become disconnected from that the more you grow in your career. The Matches just never had that ego.
“If there’s anything my own film taught me, and this experience taught the matches, it is that being an arena band and a household name is great and fun and a cool goal, but those benchmarks for success are not realistic for everybody. And while it’s fun to dream about that, I think we should all look internally and redefine what success means to us. If you can make a modest, sustainable living off of your art, that’s really exciting and, and should be celebrated. If that expands further, that’s great, but if you just have a group of people who are supporting you, that’s success, you know?”
Tickets and passes to the Oxford Film Festival are available from the festival website.
“The World Ends Tomorrow and YOU MAY DIE!” So begins SubGenius Pamphlet #1, the mysterious missive that launched J.R. “Bob” Dobbs into the cultural consciousness. The story of the unlikely creation of the Church of the SubGenius and its sprawling influence is told in a new documentary by producer/director Sandy K. Boone.
The “church” was the brainchild of two friends from Fort Worth, Texas. Douglass St. Clair Smith had been voted “weirdest” student in his high school. Steve Wilcox worked for AT&T. They were both self-proclaimed outsiders in the straight-laced Texas of the late 1970s, so when they met, they became fast friends.
Slackers — Dr. Philo Drummond (left) and Rev. Ivan Stang come clean in J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius.
The two were fascinated with all kinds of extreme beliefs and outsider art. They bonded over a common love of the psychedelic music of Captain Beefheart. This was the age of televangelists and the rise of Evangelical Christianity. Wilcox had been raised in a fundamentalist household and was intimately familiar with the culture, even though he rejected his parents’ religion.
The idea was to create a parody version of the pamphlets and flyers, such as the tracts from cartoonist Jack Chick, that littered public spaces in Fort Worth, so they created a fake religion that was supposed to seem just as insane as the kooky pamphlets they were satirizing. To do that, they needed a deity. Since their own artistic skills weren’t up to snuff, and they couldn’t afford to hire an illustrator, they turned to clip art, the open source IP of the day. In a book from the 1950s intended for use by salesmen, they found an image of a smiling white man clenching a pipe in his teeth. They named the image J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, and invented a backstory for him.
“Bob” (the quotation marks were mandatory) was a supernaturally gifted salesman who was contacted in the 1950s by a “wrathful alien space god from a corporate sin galaxy” who called himself JHVH-1. The mission of “Bob” was to bring Slack to the world. What Slack was, exactly, was left to the imagination, but in Wilcox’s words, “You know when you don’t have it.”
All religions need an adversary. The target audience for the pamphlet was defined on the front page: “Do people think you’re strange? Do you???” Since the two artists were in Dallas, conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy were fresh on their minds. Thus, the Conspiracy of Normals, intent on stealing Slack from the abnormals, was conjured into existence.
Smith renamed himself Rev. Ivan Stang, and Wilcox adopted the moniker Dr. Philo Drummond. The pamphlet included an address for the SubGenius Foundation with a pitch to send $1 in return for “Eternal salvation or triple your money back!” As Ivan Stang says in one of the many archival interviews in the documentary, “If Jim Jones convinced 900 people to kill themselves, we thought maybe we could convince 900 people to give us a dollar.”
Much to their surprise, they convinced a lot more than 900 people. Word spread quickly, and a network of artists creating copycat artworks sprang up around the country. “Bob” became an icon of ’80s counterculture. The first meeting of the SubGenius, which Stang dubbed a “devival,” attracted Devo founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale. A radio show called The Hour of Slack soon followed. “Bob” popped up in the oddest places, such as on the wall of the set of Peewee’s Playhouse. Baffled journalists didn’t know if the SubGenius crew was joking or not, and Ivan Stang, who took over running the ramshackle church, wasn’t about to tell them. The devivals became chaotic touring shows, with bands like Doktors for Bob pioneering what would become known as noise music.
As Boone’s insightful and spritely paced documentary reveals, the genius of the SubGenius was deconstructing the elements all real religions shared and reconstructing them in a funhouse mirror. But much to Stang’s dismay, he found that even a parody religion attracted sincere followers. At a massive devival in San Francisco known as The Night of Slack, Stang was accosted by a SubG who demanded to know where the real “Bob” was. Like any religion worth its creed, schisms developed, and people took the “us vs. them” narrative way too seriously. In the documentary, Stang says he decided to break character and tell the real story of the church in order to avoid creating a new Scientology after he’s gone.
In many ways, the SubGenius were ahead of their time. The church was an early adopter of the internet, and “Bob” is a proto-meme. Slack lives on as the name of a popular business conferencing app. But as the documentary points out in its closing minutes, cult-like organizations such as QAnon learned the wrong lessons from the SubGenius: No matter how nutty a group seems, if it gives them a sense of belonging, people are willing to believe.
J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius is available on Amazon Prime Video and Vimeo On Demand.
Bobby Manuel, Rick Dees, Wareen Wagner, and a Disco Duck.
Memphis is one of the greatest studio towns of all time. Sun, Phillips, Stax, American, and Ardent are just a few of the more well-known names, but a plethora of others helped capture the amazing music being made here over the years. One of them, Shoe Productions, was especially shy of the limelight in its heyday of the ’70s and ’80s, but cut some of the most memorable records of that era.
The studio was started by Wayne Crook and Warren Wagner in 1971, and Andy Black joined soon after. In 1977, Jim Stewart (the co-founder of Stax) and Bobby Manuel set up their Daily Planet Productions in the same building. Many decades later, Black went looking for whatever history of his old business might exist, and came up with nothing. So he and his son Nathan, already with years of experience in audio/visual production, set about making the documentary: Shoe: A Memphis Music Legacy. It screens Monday, October 26th, 6:30 p.m. at the Malco Summer Drive-In as part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
A quick chat with Andy and Nathan Black revealed that their documentary is just the tip of the iceberg. Shoe was buzzing with activity for over a decade, and the stories and recorded tracks are impressive.
Memphis Flyer:Memphis was really hopping as a recording city back in the ’70s.
Andy Black: Well it was. And I think part of that was, our undoing was because, we had the studio over there, and we were a bunch of kids trying to build things, and do everything ourselves with very little money. And Jim Stewart and Bobby Manuel came down. Stax had just folded and they needed to cut some stuff. And they were looking for a place to do it. So they cut there and loved the place. It was similar to Stax in the way it felt. They called their company the Daily Planet, right across the hall from Shoe. And we wound up building a second studio.
Jim used his connections with Atlantic and they bought part of the equipment. We got a brand new console, an MCI. And it worked out real well. On the Shoe side, we were doing everything ourselves. We built a console from the ground up. I mean, we etched the circuit boards and put every little component in every board in that console and soldered it together. There were about five or six of us working on it. It became such a unique sounding board, especially on the low end.
Then it got to where Jim and Bobby would come over to our studio and cut basic tracks, because they loved the way the bass and bass drum sounded. And we would go over to their side, ’cause that’s the side you wanna put the horns and the vocals on, ’cause it’s cleaner. So it became a back and forth thing. We were more or less rock and roll and pop, and when Jim and Bobby came in, a lot of people started coming over because of them, like Steve Cropper, or other people from Stax, or from Isaac Hayes’ band. So all the pop guys were going, “Wow, that’s really good. They’re good!” So we all learned from each other. Shoe was about the people and it became a learning place. We taught each other by bouncing ideas off each other.
And we kept a real low profile. Jim asked us to do that, because he didn’t want to deal with the media. Stax had just folded. He didn’t want to be bothered. And everyone thought he went “into hiding,” so to speak, and got out of the business, when really he was over there at our studio, and we were cutting every day. It turned into a real good working relationship. We kept it low-key. In this process, Nathan and I did “Take Me to the River,” and I had done a Stax documentary, just the audio. So Nathan shot everything. courtesy Andy Black
The control room at Shoe Productions
I was over at Sun Studios, and killing time with the kid that was running it. And we got to talking about Shoe, and I told him all about it, and he said, ‘Man, I thought I knew everything about Memphis music back in the ’70s and ’80s, but I have not heard these stories.’ Well it turned out that that kid was [Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer] Matt Ross-Spang.
I went home and Googled “Shoe” and got nothing. It was just like we didn’t exist. I said, ‘Damn, we kept such a low profile, we’re getting left out of history.’ So I talked to Nathan and said, what do you think about us going in on this project together? Nathan was practically raised there. I used to take him to the studio with me all the time, as a young child. So he’s well aware of the story.
Nathan Black: It was interesting for me because one of the first things we did was get the old group back together. There’s a recording session in it. So that was the first time a lot of those guys had been there in 30 years, and going back into the space, and it was the first time I’d been in there in 30 years too. And the Daily Planet side is exactly the same way it was back then. It’s still a working studio, and everything’s the same, down to the carpet. It was like walking back in a time warp. I spent a lot of time there, but I was young, probably 8 or 10 years old. So I knew all the people, but I didn’t really know the stories. So it was interesting to me, hearing all those stories from people I knew and had been around all the time. I was just a kid going to work with my dad. I remember making little forts up under the grand piano, playing with my GI Joes.
AB: Jimmy Griffin was co-founder of Bread with David Gates. And he’s a Memphis boy. He was from Memphis and went out to L.A. and they formed Bread. And had many, many hits. And he came back and we became friends. He was out jogging one day, and came in and introduced himself. He and I and two other guys had a writing group. We wrote songs all the time. And we wound up cutting an album with Terry Sylvester of the Hollies.
Was that one of the first things you did there?
AB: It was an early thing. Actually, one of the first things we did was Jimmy himself, because Jimmy was such a good singer. And we had some writers, so we decided that Shoe needed to start a label, and we used Jimmy as our first artist on Shoe Records. It’s funny because the records have turned up a couple times on eBay, and they’re selling for between $50-$100 a piece — for a ’45! And I’m like, ‘Damn, I’ve got probably 75 of these things.’
There’s a whole section on “Disco Duck” and how that came to be. It was originally on Estelle Axton’s label, Fretone Records. [Celebrity DJ] Rick Dees had gone to her with the idea of doing a disco song. She connected him with Bobby Manuel and they finished it, and Bobby cut it, and RSO Records bought it. And they wanted an album right away. So we cut an album in two weeks. Every day, all day long.
NB: There is a whole section of the film about the Dog Police. I remember my dad taking me to the studio where they were shooting it. I even brought home some of the dog masks.
AB: They were doing jingles, because they were three of the finest jazz musicians in town. They’d go over the Media General and crank out those jingles like crazy. Shoe also did jingles, but so we could support our creativity in songs and records. So Tony [Thomas] and them came over and I wound up cutting two jazz albums with them, and both of them got shot down. They didn’t get a deal and they were so bummed out. So they said, We’re gonna do something REAL different. Whatever you want to do, Andy, it’s total freedom. And we didn’t have a lot of electronic gear back then, so I took a microphone and stuck it in the end of a vacuum cleaner hose and gave Tom Lonardo the other end and said ‘Here, sing into this.’
I remember when I was young and used to sing through the vacuum hose and it sounded so cool! So we did all kind of crazy things. And Wayne and Warren heard all this going on through the walls, and they became really interested in it. Wayne was getting into video at that time. MTV was starting to get pretty big. So it just married together. We actually did a whole album.
Still from ‘Dog Police’ video
NB: The video won MTV’s Basement Tapes, hosted by Weird Al Yankovic. I think it was NBC that picked it up and did an actual pilot, they were planning on making it a show. You can see it on YouTube. The pilot has Adam Sandler in it, and Jeremy Piven.
It seems like there was a cool experimental environment at Shoe. I noticed the Scruffs cut their debut there.
AB: Yeah! They used to come in and pull the night shift after everybody else had gone home to bed. The Scruffs would come in and cut til the wee hours of the morning. And then other people would show up in the morning and they would leave. We had two studios that were just pumping out projects all the time. I produced Joyce Cobb. We had a hit song with her, “Dig the Gold,” that went up to #42 in the nation on Billboard. And we had Rick Christian, who got a deal with Mercury records, and one of his songs got picked up by Kenny Rogers and he had a #1 hit with it. And we had Shirley Brown coming over there. We had Levon Helm coming over there. It became a very active place. And that’s why it puzzled me that no one knew anything about it. Then it dawned on me why.
That low profile.
AB: Yeah, it’ll get ya every time!
The first time I heard about Shoe was reading that Chris Bell cut some of “I Am the Cosmos” there. Were you in on that?
AB: I wasn’t in on that session. Warren did. They were friends, so Warren invited him and Ken Woodley to come down and Richard Rosebrough down to Shoe, and they came in late, ’cause that was the only time slot they could fit in there. They cut “I Am the Cosmos” and one or two others. And people are still interested in Big Star and Chris Bell. One day on Facebook, I saw where people were taking pictures through the windows and saying, “Look, I think this is the room where ‘I Am the Cosmos’ was cut.” And I looked at it and went, ‘No, that’s the bathroom!’
That track was actually cut on the other side of the building. We occupied both sides of this really great building. It was supposed to be a basement for a church. So the bottom floor was 16″-18″ of packed concrete and partly underground. So it was super quiet.
NB: Apparently the pastor of the church ran off with the money, so they only built the basement. That’s all that exists! You walk through the front door and you immediately have to go downstairs. So everything was underground. No ground floor, no windows.
AB: It’s really bizarre. We only had one little sign by the front door and that was it. It was just kinda word of mouth. Elvin Bishop came over. Dr. John. I could go on and on. We had to leave out a lot. In fact, there’s enough stories for us to do a Shoe 2!
The Story of Shoe Productions’ Many Hits, Brought to Life on Film
Suhair Lauck at her post behind the cash register in the documentary The Little Tea Shop.
As director of operations for Indie Memphis, Brighid Wheeler has had a crazy year. She and her organization have been charged with trying to figure out how to throw a film festival amid a worldwide pandemic. “I think the biggest challenge — I don’t necessarily want to speak for the whole team, but I think it would resonate with each team member — has been reminding yourself that every situation needs to be rethought. The moment you find yourself approaching something in the same way you would have pre-pandemic, you need to start over.”
The 2020 festival, which began on Wednesday night, is taking place online and outdoors. Indie Memphis has already moved their weekly programming online with the help of Memphis-based cinema services company Eventive. The staff, who specialize in in-person events, have had to learn to become broadcasters on the fly. There’s been a lot of time spent teleconferencing, says Wheeler. “Suddenly, you become an expert in a very specific sense on Zoom, like for our Tuesday nights, when we’re doing our weekly screenings and, [artistic director] Miriam [Bale] was hosting various industry people and having conversations about films with a filmmaker or a critic.”
But the new challenges have brought new opportunities. Wheeler says this has been driven home for her as the team records filmmaker interviews for the festival. “I’m reminded sitting through these Q&As that this is such a unique opportunity. Of course, I would prefer to have these filmmakers physically in Memphis. We are Indie Memphis. That’s our brand. But I’m able to have the majority of the filmmakers for each short film block in attendance for the Q&As. That is just something that is not always afforded to us at the in-person festival.”
Wheeler is in charge of programming the short films for the festival. This year, there are almost 200 of them, organized in themed blocks, all of which are available online. “In my time programming Indie Memphis, I’ve never been as proud of a shorts program as I am about this one,” she says. “I think that speaks to a number of different things, but I want to highlight first and foremost Kayla Myers, who has been a great addition to our programming team.”
On Thursday night, Indie Memphis takes over all four screens at the Malco Summer Drive-In. The Hometowner Documentary Shorts program, which begins at 6:30 PM, features both Memphis filmmakers and newcomers. It begins with “American Dream Safari,” G.B. Shrewsbury’s portrait of Tad Pierson, the Bluff City tour guide operator whose expertise in local music sites is unrivaled. Zaire Love, a graduate of the Crosstown Arts residency program, takes audiences on the “Road to Step,” which examines Black fraternity culture’s step show competition at Ole Miss. Artistic polymath Donald Meyers’ “The Lonely” is an intimate portrait of elderly isolation, and a plea for compassion. Bailey Smith’s “Holding On” is a chronicle of Memphis musician Don Lifted’s first U.S. tour. Matthew Lee urges the audience with “Remembering Veteran’s Day.” Emily Burkhead gets experimental with the hybrid doc “She Is More,” featuring musician Jordan Occasionally. Tyler Pilkington’s “Teched Out” explores the frontier of transhumanism, where the line between human and machine is blurred. Kierra Turner chronicles NBA player Jonathan Stark’s recovery from a potentially career-ending injury in “Wake ‘Em Up.” Josh Cooper’s “Loose Leaves” brings the story of a group of Black women entrepreneurs in Orange Mound. And finally, Matteo Servante and Molly Wexler’s “Little Tea Shop” gives you the background on the famous Downtown restaurant where you can find power players seated next to a person experiencing homelessness, and the immigrant restauranteur Suhair Lauck who brings them together.
“It’s an introduction to Memphis,—a taste of different areas and people within our city,” says Wheeler. “We know how hardworking our filmmakers are, but to see, even through the pandemic, the resilience they continue to display as they make their work is nothing short of amazing.”
Indie Memphis 2020 continues through Thursday, October 29. You can buy online and in-person passes at indiememphis,org.
The most startling statistic in Class Action Park goes by fast. While testing the infamous Cannonball Loop waterslide that sat near the entrance to Action Park, an engineer determined that riders would experience upwards of 9 g. That’s nine times the force of gravity. For reference, a Space Shuttle launch subjected astronauts to a maximum of 3.5 g. The average person passes out after a few seconds at 5 g. In 2018, cosmonauts escaping a disintegrating Russian rocket briefly pulled 7 g. The only people who have ever experienced more than 9 g and lived to tell about it are highly trained fighter pilots wearing protective equipment—and kids who went to Action Park in the summer of 1985.
The Cannonball Loop at Action Park, circa 1985.
Founded in 1978, the Vernon, New Jersey theme park had many nicknames, including Class Action Park and Traction Park. It was a rite of passage for a generation of New York and New Jersey teens and tweens. The Cannonball Loop was decommissioned after one summer, but it sat near Action Park’s entrance until it closed in 1996, the physical embodiment of owner Gene Mulvihill’s anything-goes philosophy of mass entertainment. But there was more where that came from — a lot more. The go-karts had a maximum speed of 60 MPH, and the track was right next to the beer garden. The wave pool had a “death zone.” There were so many injuries that local officials forced the park to buy its own ambulance.
If there was anything more dangerous than going to Action Park, it was working at Action Park. They were all young (one of the interviewees was Head of Security when he was 17 years old) and chock full of drink and drugs. The closing weekend parties, paid for by money recovered from the bottoms of pools and auctioning off items in the lost and found, are the stuff of New Jersey teenage legend. After test dummies sent through the Cannonball Loop came out dismembered, Mulvihill enticed his employees to be the first human subjects by standing at the bottom of the slide waving $100 bills. Later, he attacked workers with a fake cattle prod.
Needless to say, nothing like Action Park could survive in today’s regulatory and litigation environment. It was only rampant criminality, fueled by a Wall Street money laundering scheme, that allowed Action Park to thrive in the first place. But the fact that the park survived 16 years after the first patron death, caused when a teenager was ejected from the Alpine Slide and flew face-first into a stone wall, speaks to the difference between the Reagan years and today.
And yet, Action Park is remembered with fondness by the majority of the people interviewed by directors Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges. Maybe “fondness” is the wrong word; more like a mixture of nostalgia and astonishment. The best of the interviewees is comedian Chris Gethard, who says every member of his family was injured at Action Park—but they kept going back.
The not-so-lazy river ride.
Class Action Park is enormously entertaining in that watching-a-train-wreck kind of way. But it’s also about the power of memory to transform borderline trauma into good times. Looking back on the experience with fully developed frontal lobes, none of the interviewees would ever send their own kids into the Action Park meat grinder.
Was something of value lost when the laissez-faire childrearing philosophy gave way to helicopter parenting? Arguably, yes — but don’t tell that to the still-grieving parents of the Action Park casualties. Featuring apparently every foot of film and video ever shot at the park (including an MTV Headbangers Ball episode where drug-addled members of Alice In Chains hurl themselves down life-threatening waterslides) and some excellent animation illustrating the workings of the more extreme rides, Class Action Park is a tight doc. I’ll have to say, I have always heard people who grew up in New Jersey claim to be tougher than your average teenager. After seeing what they used to do for fun, I now believe them.
The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.”
That’s what director Bong Joon Ho said to Vulture when he was asked about Parasite becoming the first Korean film to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s funny because it’s true. Hollywood has been called a “mill town,” and the Academy Awards are basically just an annual industry banquet with an incredible PR team. The awards are usually settled by voters who are either too busy to see enough films to make a meaningful decision or hopelessly out of touch with the zeitgeist or both. Controversy is guaranteed — this is a feature, not a bug.
Originally, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t even consider films made outside of the United States. After giving out honorary awards for several years to films like Bicycle Thieves and Rashomon, the first Best Foreign Language Film was Federico Fellini’s La Strada in 1957.
One reason non-Hollywood films have always been an afterthought at the Oscars is because non-English films with subtitles have traditionally been a hard sell in America. But as the country becomes more diverse, that has been changing. These days, Malco Theaters regularly devotes screens to Bollywood movies. As I write this, the Telugu film Disco Raja is playing at the Majestic. The mainline Hollywood studios have become more and more dependent on foreign box office, which might be another incentive for the Academy to open up internationally. The subtitled Roma won Best Foreign Language Film and earned a Best Director award for Alfonso Cuarón in 2018, but a subtitled film has still never won Best Picture. Parasite, which I think is the best film from a pretty good year, has a chance to make history.
Another subtitled nominee has a chance to make history this year. Best Foreign Language Film got a long-overdue name change to Best International Feature Film, and Honeyland is nominated for both that honor and for Best Documentary. It’s no surprise the film has resonated. It’s a humane and fascinating story told with nuance and compassion for all of its subjects by directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov.
The project reportedly began life as a short film about efforts to preserve the area around the River Bregalnica in North Macedonia, until the directors met Hatidze Muratova. She is a beekeeper living with her 85-year-old mother in some of the roughest and most remote terrain in Europe. When we first meet her, Muratova is climbing along a treacherous mountain ridge to get to a rocky outcrop where a hive of bees has taken shelter. She takes a honeycomb and gently coaxes bees into her handmade, conical hive. She sings to the bees as she works, giving the impression that she’s not so much robbing the hive as she is recruiting workers.
Hatidze Muratova tends her hives in Honeyland.
Muratova’s world is timeless, idyllic, and lonely. She and her mother are the last two inhabitants of an abandoned village. Her beehives are tucked into nooks and crevices in crumbling stone walls that look like they could be 100 — or 1,000 — years old. Her golden rule is to never take more than half of the honey from any one hive, to ensure the bees have plenty to eat for themselves. Although she frequently works without protective equipment, we never see her get stung by a bee.
The natural rhythms of Muratova’s life are interrupted by the arrival of a family of itinerant farmers — Hussein Sam and his wife and seven children. They arrive in a caravan of cattle, trailers, and tractors, filling the silent hills with noise. At first, Muratova is happy to have new people to talk to. The Sams clearly have their hands full, and she’s got the farmer’s instinct for cooperation. But when Sam decides to take up beekeeping, conflict becomes inevitable. The contrast between his boxy, mass-produced hives and her handmade, organic hives becomes the film’s central visual metaphor. Muratova patiently tries to explain the sustainable, traditional beekeeping methods developed over thousands of years, but Sam has hungry mouths to feed and a pushy client who wants to move as much product as possible.
There are no good guys and bad guys here, just struggling people responding to incentives. Honeyland is cinéma vérité, which means there’s no voice-over and no talking head interviews. But there is more character and story in the film’s 87 minutes than in most $100 million blockbusters. As Bong Joon Ho said in his Golden Globe acceptance speech, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
Review movies for a Memphis publication, and you’re going to watch more than your share of Elvis flicks. Most of them either walk through the basic facts of his life and career from a certain, allegedly novel point of view, or take a specific incident and dramatize it or explore it for meaning.
The view from Elvis’ Rolls Royce in The King.
But The King is unlike any Elvis documentary, in that it is not really about Elvis, or at least, not solely about Elvis. Director Eugene Jarecki wants to talk about Elvis as an avatar for America. This territory has been in plain sight the whole time, of course, but no one has ever explored it so thoroughly.
Jarecki’s vessel for his voyage of exploration is Elvis’ Rolls Royce, a silver monster of an automobile from the 1960s that was elegant in its day but rickety and temperamental now. This is what you call a no-miss pitch: Ride around the country in Elvis’ car, get some musicians in the car, let them expound on how cool Elvis was, and boom, you got a movie the fans will watch. Well, it didn’t turn out that way. In a remarkable little sequence about a half hour into the picture, Jarecki turns the camera on a senior member of his crew who tells the director to his face that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Jarecki instantly agrees, much to the consternation of the seasoned film worker to whom “director without a plan” spells disaster.
Indeed, some of the scenes of the film look like failed attempts at staging compelling scenes. Creator of The Wire, David Simon, sits on a stoop in Baltimore awkwardly playing electric guitar and critiques the film’s premise. It should have been one of the Cadillacs instead of the Rolls, he says. Since it’s an English car, the metaphor falls apart. Jarecki has plenty of other opportunities to regret the Rolls as it repeatedly breaks down in the middle of interviews.
The filmmaker’s warts-and-all approach to presenting himself turns out to be a canny move, as it gives him more leeway to comment on Elvis the man, and how he related to Elvis the rock star, and Elvis the avatar for American empire. Elvis scholar Peter Guralnick, famous superfan Ethan Hawke both temper their praise for the King with sobering observations. Chuck D, who famously called Elvis a racist in “Fight The Power”, offers a fuller assessment of the man behind the legend. His words are among the film’s most powerful.
Everyone who looked at Elvis saw something different, and there are moments of unalloyed beauty and raw emotion. Stoic songwriter John Haitt bursts into tears as he climbs into the back seat of the limo, moved by the splendid but profound isolation it represented. A group of kids from the Stax Academy are captured in the intimate space making beautiful harmonies together. Dan Rather waxes rhapsodic about Elvis and the America he represented atop the Empire State Building.
Likewise, everyone who looks at America sees a different thing. As the film crew and their reluctant automobile tool around the country, the 2016 catastrophe happens around them. The ordinary people Jarecki meets on the streets of the places where Elvis once walked provide the most fascinating moments.
There’s no summing up this sprawling, impressionistic document of America on the cusp of profound change. The closest recent analog to the film is probably Agnes Varda’s Faces Places, but there’s a level of tension here not present in that pastoral romp. The King is required viewing for not just Elvis fans and Memphians, but anyone who strives to understand the state of our sprawling democratic experiment.
I’ve started to become suspicious when someone points and says “This is what America is all about” or “this is not America.” America is many things. Americans wrote: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Americans also owned slaves — and later, freed slaves. America is a nation of immigrants that erected a statue welcoming the tired, poor, and hungry masses yearning to breathe free. Americans have also looked down on, at various times, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Cuban, and Hispanic immigrants. America is, as the bad term paper cliche goes, a land of contrasts. Because America is made up of humans, who are themselves a mixture of good and bad, the American identity is always a tug of war between extremes.
From 1968 to 2002, one of our perpetual tug of war’s strongest pullers for good was Fred Rogers. He was a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania who fell in love with television, and saw in it a potential to do good on a vast scale. His TV show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, started on a Pittsburgh area educational television station in 1968 and became PBS’ first hit. As one producer puts it early in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Mr. Rogers’ show was the exact opposite of everything conventional wisdom held was “good TV.” The sets were cheap, the puppets nowhere near Muppet levels of sophistication, and there were often long stretches of silence. And yet it became a cultural touchstone, thanks to the steady magnetism and stalwart humanity of its host.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is helmed by Morgan Neville, one of the finest documentary directors working today. He won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2013 with his film about backup singers, 20 Feet From Stardom, and last year he shared an Emmy with Memphian Robert Gordon for Best of Enemies, the story of the epic political debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 election season. (Neville’s new film also boasts a Memphis connection: composer Jonathan Kirkscey provides the score.)
Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood
Documentaries are always judged first by their subject, and Neville has a knack for choosing exactly the right ones. A master of documentary structure, he makes the case for Rogers’ continued relevance right out of the gate. Launched in 1968, during the most violent period of the Vietnam War and the rash of political assassinations in America, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood never shied away from wrestling with tough questions. During its very first week, there was a storyline where King Friday XIII wanted to build a wall around the Neighborhood of Make Believe because he was frightened of change. After Robert Kennedy was killed, Rogers did a week of shows teaching children how to deal with death.
The most electrifying moment in the film comes when Rogers is asked to testify before a Congressional committee hearing debating the future of PBS. His unpretentious eloquence brings everyone in the room to tears, including the senator who is there to grill him for wasting $20 million of taxpayer money on kid’s shows. Through it all, Rogers’ uncanny talent for connecting onscreen shines through as he makes friends with everyone from cellist Yo Yo Ma to KoKo the gorilla, who signs “friend” and “love” at the TV host.
You can tell a lot about a person by the quality of his enemies. Rogers was a lifelong Republican who advocated for an “open, accepting Christianity.” During the early years of Fox News, Rogers was routinely attacked as a decadent influence whose doctrine of radical compassion had raised a generation of soft liberals. When he died, his funeral was picketed by the notorious hate group Westboro Baptist Church. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is what you would call a warts and all documentary — or at least, you would call it that if its subject had any real warts to expose. At various points during the film, the people who knew and worked with Rogers say that he was exactly the same person offscreen as onscreen, thoroughly kind and empathetic to a fault. The worst thing Neville can come up with in the interest of balance is that, toward the end of his TV career, he started to identify more with the grumpy King Friday XIII than with the meek Daniel Tiger. I guess power really does get to everyone eventually.
courtesy Andy Black 
courtesy Andy Black 
Courtesy of Last Bite Films. 
