This is the best column anyone ever wrote in the history of Memphis.
Many people have thought about writing a column this good but were unable to get it done. People are saying no one can write a column like I can, and they are right. It’s not surprising. That’s because I invented the word “column.” I have all the best words, and no one else even compares.
Geoff Calkins tried 11 times to write this column. Dan Conaway couldn’t even make his fingers move when he tried to write this column. Tonyaa Weathersbee? No way. John Beifuss? Don’t make me laugh. Even Jackson Baker gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen.
I’m a stable genius, and I’m the best. Get over it. No one writes like I can. But writing isn’t all I do.
Many of you have probably driven by the empty pedestals in Memphis’ Downtown parks. Most people don’t know there used to be statues of Confederates there. They were very fine people, but the statues were put up after the War Between the States, which I call the “Civil War.” Many people don’t know that we had a Civil War. That’s because it was 300 years ago, which is why we needed to take down the statues. They were too old.
I called the mayor of Memphis last year and said, “Mayor Stricker, those statues have to come down.” He said, “Sir, no one has been able to take down those statues. They’ve been there for 250 years. It can’t be done, sir.” Well, I got it done. Afterwards, he said, “Sir, I did not think anyone could do that. Thank you.” There were strong men and women in the mayor’s office, and they were all crying because they didn’t think anyone could take down those statues. They all said, “What a great outcome, sir. Thank you. And congratulations.”
True story. You can look it up.
Many of you will be surprised to learn that the University of Memphis football team used to be terrible. It’s true. They lost 29 games in a row in 2003. It was ridiculous how bad they were. Most people don’t know that David Rudge, the president of the university, called me a couple of years ago. He was whimpering and crying on the phone. He said, “Sir, what can we do? People are saying our football team is terrible.”
I said, “Hire a great coach, Dave.” And I told him about this young fellow, Mark Norveen, who at the time was an assistant volleyball coach at Arkansas College. Most people haven’t heard of Arkansas College. Great school, just outside of Tulsa. Mark’s a handsome young man. Right out of central casting. “Hire Mark Norveen,” I said.
Well, Dave did, and look what happened. The Tigers have been undefeated for six years, and they’re going to be on Fox’s “Gamers Day” show with Steve Doocy this weekend against the great University of Notre Dame.
I plan to be at the game. They’re going to put my picture on the big television screen — I call it a JumboTron — so people can cheer for me. People are saying I’ll get the greatest ovation in the history of football. They say 20,000 people won’t even be able to get into the stadium.
There are lots of other things that many people don’t know about me. For example, I helped do the deal to get Bass Pro to build a pyramid Downtown. It used to be a Walgreens. The elevator to the top? That was my idea. The giant man-eating alligators? That was my idea, too.
And many people would be surprised to learn that I was behind getting $270 million dollars allocated from the city to move the Raymond James brokerage out of that dump Downtown into a great new building they already owned out in eastern Memphis.
Here are some other things people would be surprised to learn about me:
I helped design the Midtown Kroger parking lot.
I taught Penny Hardaway how to do a crossover dribble.
I named Mud Island.
I invented barbecued ribs.
Do I get any credit? No. But that’s all right. I’m a big boy. I don’t need the applause. I don’t need everybody to grovel and suck up to me. Many, many people are saying I’m the best columnist ever and this is the greatest column anyone ever wrote. That’s enough for me. For now.
Indie Memphis and the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission continue their Memphis In May bicentennial series of films with Memphis roots this Wednesday at Studio On The Square.
N-Secure is a paranoid thriller filmed in Memphis by director David M. Matthews in 2009. Commercial Appeal film writer John Beifuss will be on hand to conduct the Q&A and put the film in context for the audience. You can get tickets on the Indie Memphis website.
N-Secure Intrigue, Women of Punk This Week At the Movies
Then, on Thursday, the new Crosstown Arts film series continues with a cult gem from the punk age. Contemporary with Rock and Roll High School, The Decline of Western Civilization, and The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains is one of the earliest onscreen depictions of the movement that was not an anti-punk screed like the infamous Quincy episode.
It’s also the only one to embody early punk’s feminist side. Starring Diane Lane as bandleader Connie Burns and a pre-Blue Velvet Laura Dern as a member of the sarcastic garage band who become media sensations with caustic music and incredible eye makeup, the low-budget cult film also includes cameos from Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and The Clash’s Paul Simonon.
It sank quickly at the box office in 1982, but became a cult classic from years of cable TV screenings. It also just feels dangerous, like punk should. The screening begins at 7 PM on Thursday night at the Crosstown Theater.
N-Secure Intrigue, Women of Punk This Week At the Movies (2)
After a pause caused by the festival itself, here’s the next-to-last installment of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits, where we count down the winners of the Best of Indie Memphis poll. You can get caught up with part one, part two, and part three.
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011)
Paradise Lost directors Joe Berlinger (left) and Bruce Sinofsky (right) pose with Jason Baldwin (center).
The West Memphis Three case is one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. But if it weren’t for a couple of struggling directors pitching a true crime documentary to HBO in the early 1990s, Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly would still be in jail for a crime they didn’t commit. Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger’s came to the Mid South asking, how could three normal teenagers commit such a gruesome crime? But once they got here, they quickly became convinced that the accused were innocent. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills would prove to be one of the most consequential documentaries ever, and has influenced a generation of works from Serial to True Detective. Berlinger and Sinofsky followed the case for 18 years, and when new DNA evidence came to light, their cameras were there. In 2011, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory had its second public screening at Indie Memphis weeks after the West Memphis Three walked free. When Jason Baldwin walked onstage unannounced at the Q&A, it was one of the most electric moments in Indie Memphis history. Later that year, the film was nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards.
Undefeated (2011)
The same film beat Paradise Lost 3 at both the Oscars and Indie Memphis’ documentary category that year. Undefeated was directed by Daniel Lindsey and T.J. Martin told the story of the Manassas High School Tigers and their coach Bill Courtney as they attempt to turn around their school’s historic losing streak on the football field. Today, Undefeated remains a sports movie staple.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks
Antenna (2012)
The Memphis punk scene started in January 1978, when the Sex Pistols played at the Taliesyn Ballroom—now the site of the Taco Bell on Union Avenue. A bunch of kids who thought they were the only ones listening to punk rock in Memphis found each other that night. Months later, some of them descended on The Well, a down-on-its-luck country western bar a few blocks from the Taliesyn, on Madison Avenue. In 1981, The Well became Antenna, the most radical music venue in the south. For the next fourteen years, Antenna was a haven for freaks and the home of new music in Memphis. National bands like R.E.M., Black Flag, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Green Day played at Antenna years before they were filling arenas. It was ground zero for Memphis’ alternative creative explosion that flew under the national radar while spawning groups like Panther Burns, Pezz, The Oblivians, The Grifters, and Jay Reatard—just to name a few.
When I was approached by Ross Johnson and John Floyd about making a documentary about Antenna and the music scene that thrived there, I knew it was something the Memphis community sorely needed. But I balked at the opportunity. I worried about the availability of archival footage. Antenna existed before the age when everyone had a cameraphone in their pockets. Would there be tape of bands like The Modifiers playing at Antenna? Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Antenna owner Steve McGehee knows everybody. By the time Antenna premiered at Indie Memphis in 2012, we had amassed more than 100 hours of vintage video, hundreds of still images, and 88 interviews, some of which were three hours long.
It’s difficult for me to talk about Antenna today. After winning the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize at Indie Memphis 2012, we have tried in vain for years to find finishing funds to pay for the music licensing fees. I am extremely grateful that enough people remembered Antenna to vote it onto the list. Hopefully one day, everyone can see it. Until then, this is the only bit of untold Memphis music history I can share with you:
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (2)
Very Extremely Dangerous (2012)
One of the highlights of Indie Memphis 2017 was Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell proclaiming Friday, November 3 Best of Enemies Day. Director Robert Gordon, who helped originate the project he co-directed with Morgan Neville, has had a long and distinguished career as a writer and director before winning an Emmy for Best of Enemies. In 2012, a film he produced with Irish director Paul Duane made waves at Indie Memphis. Very Extremely Dangerous opens with Gordon and Duane almost getting in a car wreck with their subject Jerry McGill, a 70 year old junkie, criminal, and Memphis musician. McGill had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he brought along Duane and Gordon’s camera to record his final comeback performance/crime spree. To call Very Extremely Dangerous a harrowing watch is a dramatic understatement, but somehow, McGill comes out of it as a sympathetic character.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (3)
Keep The Lights On (2012)
Memphis-born Ira Sachs has long been one of the most intimate and truthful directors of the indie era. He got his start in the Bluff City before Indie Memphis got rolling with The Delta, an autobiographical coming-of-age story. In 2005, when Hustle & Flow won the audience award at Sundance, Sachs’ film Forty Shades of Blue won the Grand Jury Prize. Keep The Lights On is the story of an extremely dysfunctional relationship between Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul (Zachary Booth), a filmmaker and lawyer living in Sach’s adopted home of New York who can’t help but bring out the worst in each other. Sachs keeps the audience’s expectations vacillating between “I hope these two kids can get it together in the end” and “They need to stay the hell away from each other.” It’s a story about the joys and limits of romantic love.
Keep The Lights On was the first film in a trilogy of sorts from Sachs about trying to stay human while living in New York. 2014’s Love Is Strange stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a pair of longtime partners whose love is finally legal, but who are unexpectedly ripped apart after they finally tie the knot. 2016’s Little Men is a story Sach says was inspired by his Memphis childhood about friendship between kids from different social classes who find their lives disrupted by the creeping gentrification of Brooklyn. Sachs’ work is humane, beautiful to a fault, and absolutely required viewing for Memphis film fans.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (4)
What I Love About Concrete (2013)
Remember when you were in high school and thought, “We should make a movie about our crazy lives!” Well, Alanna Stewart and Katherine Dohan actually did it, and their film is probably much better than yours would have been. The two White Station High Schoolers, with the help of Brett Hanover, created a home grown, magical realist masterpiece—imagine if Pretty In Pink had been written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Morgan Rose Stewart (sister of the director) stars as Molly, a woman who finds herself growing very-not-metaphorical wings in her senior year, just as she is preparing for college and the big essay contest. The practical special effects and handmade animation sequences carry considerable visual punch, but it’s the unmannered acting and wild expanse of it all that elevates What I Love About Concrete to the level of the sublime. The film won at Indie Memphis, and has the distinction of being Commercial Appeal movie writer John Beifuss’ only acting credit.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (5)
“I Wanted To Make A Movie About A Beautiful and Tragic Memphis” (2013)
“I sometimes find it easier to reveal intimate details about myself through art. This is prime example” says Laura Jean Hocking. After spending years locked in a small dark room with me editing Antenna, Hocking wanted to do something completely different. She wrote, produced, and directed this Midtown memoir completely by herself. It is at once a celebration of place, a confession, and a series of visual experiments. Hocking collaborated transatlantically with Memphis expat musician Jimi Enck, who scored the film while living in London.
At the 2017 Indie Memphis festival, Hocking and her co-director Melissa Anderson Sweazy won Best Hometowner Feature and the Audience Award for their documentary Good Grief about kids who have experienced tragedy and the counsellors who help them at the Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief in Collierville.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (6)
Short Term 12 (2013)
By 2013, Indie Memphis’ profile had risen high enough to land the biggest films on the festival circuit. Destin Daniel Cretton’s film Short Term 12, loosely inspired by his time as a counsellor in a group home for troubled teens, swept the Independent Spirit Awards and launched the career of Brie Larson. As one of the biggest vote-getters in the poll, it remains a favorite of Indie Memphis audiences.
It Felt Like Love (2013)
Here’s a little story that tells you what film festival life is like. In 2013, I was on the screening committee for Indie Memphis. We were tasked with finding the eight best features out of the hundreds of applicants that flood into Indie Memphis every year. Late in the season, we had whittled the list down to about a dozen when we noticed that no female directors were represented on the short list. Since it was pretty inconceivable that, in 2013, no women had made and submitted a decent movie, we dug back into the pile of DVDs. At the bottom was It Felt Like Love by Eliza Hitman, and when we popped it into the player, we were absolutely riveted. It was clear that this coming of age film was by far the best thing we had seen that year, and we almost lost it in the shuffle. Later, at the festival, the judges (who are not members of the screening committee) agreed, and It Felt Like Love won 2013’s Best Narrative Feature award.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (7)
Film critic John Beifuss was honored with the Indie Memphis Vision Award at the awards ceremony last Saturday night at Circuit Playhouse. The Vision Award is given to “someone who has made a lasting impact” on the Indie Memphis Film Festival and the Mid South cinema community as a whole. Presenter Ryan Watt, the festival’s executive director, presented the award, called Beifuss “Memphis’ pre-eminent film journalist and critic” and praising his “dedicated coverage of the film festival as well as independent film in general, giving the art of filmmaking and unwavering presence in the press due to his efforts.” The normally unflappable Beifuss’ voice cracked with emotion as he accepted the award. After the takeover of the Commercial Appeal by Gannett earlier this year, Beifuss was taken off the film criticism beat and reassigned as an entertainment reporter, leading to a letter writing campaign and social media protests from his readers.
Breezy Lucia
Film critic John Beifuss accepts his Vision Award at the Indie Memphis Film Festival’s awards ceremony on Saturday, November 5 2016 at the Circuit Playhouse.
Other awards at the 19th annual festival includes Deb Shoval’s AWOL receiving both the Best Narrative Feature and the Audience Award, Maise Crow’s Jackson receiving both the Best Documentary Feature and the Audience Award, and Ala Har’el’s LoveTrue receiving both the Best Departures and Audience Awards for experimental features. This is the first time in the history of the festival that three films have won both audience and jury awards.
The Hometowner Feature awards went to Madsen Minax’s Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum and the Audience Award went to Kathy Lofton’s I Am A Caregiver. The jury awarded Best Hometowner Narrative Short award to Graham Uhleski and Daniel Ray Hamby’s “Doppleganger”, while Best Hometowner Documentary Short went to “A.J.” by Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking. Hocking also won the Hometowner Narrative Short Audience Award for “How To Skin A Cat”, which she co-directed with C. Scott McCoy (which, full disclosure, is this columist’s filmmaking nom de guerre). The winner of the Hometowner Narrative Short Audience Award was “The Rugby Boys of Venice” by Jared Biunno. Special Jury Prizes when to Kevin Brooks for his skateboarding short “Keep Pushing” and actress Gabrielle Gobel for her role in “Teeth”.
The Indie Award went to Sarah Fleming for her roles as first assistant director and cinematographer on multiple productions in the festival, although the presenter did single her out for serving on the crew of Free In Deed while both six months pregnant with her first child and sporting a broken foot.
Early estimates suggest a record turnout for Indie Memphis 2016, which spanned seven days and screened films at downtown’s Halloran Centre, Overton Square’s Circuit Playhouse, the Malco Ridgeway Cinema, and Collierville. For more information on Indie Memphis’ year-round programming schedule and a complete list of the winners, visit the Indie Memphis website.
So, you ask, what’s all this internetting doing to me, anyway? You’re not alone in questioning the effects of advanced communications tech on the human brain that evolved basically to find food and a mate and create strategies to the get the food and have sex. But you may be surprised to learn that one of the most potent explorations of the question of our relationship to technology was made in 1983.
James Woods gets personal with his new device in Videodrome.
When he created VIdeodrome, director David Cronenberg was coming off his first big hit in Scanners, a horror film about killer telepaths that was sold with the image of a man’s head exploding.
The money shot from Scanners.
Videodrome combined the body and sexual horror themes of Cronenberg’s earlier, low-budget indies with his musings about the evolving media landscape that was increasingly saturated with an expanding cable TV landscape and the home video revolution brought on by the spread of the videocassette players. Cronenberg’s nightmare was a population desensitized to horror and violence and imbued with a desire to merge with the machines delivering the images.
Debbie Harry in VIdeodrome
Starring TV actor James Woods and punk goddess Debbie Harry, the film lost money on release, but became a cult classic when teenage horror addicts seeking cheap thrills found it on video store shelves in the late 80s. Cronenberg moved on to big budget horror pictures in Hollywood, such as his classic remake of The Fly, and later outré literary adaptation such as Naked Lunch and Crash. But for many fans, Videodrome remains his masterpiece.
Tonight at 7 PM, Indie Memphis is screening Videodrome as part of the Memphis in May salute to Canadian cinema. Afterwards, yours truly will participate in a panel discussion with Commercial Appeal film critic John Beifuss, Black Lodge Video proprietor Matt Martin, and University of Memphis Communications professor Marina Levina.
Breezy Lucia 
