Get ready to experience a new crop of weird America’s discarded video tapes.
On Nov. 26, Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher return to the Barrymore Theatre with a fresh box full of videos for the Found Footage Festival. The two have been collecting oddball videos since 1991, when they happened upon an industrial film called Inside and Outside Custodial Duties. Since then, their quirky sense of humor has helped get them jobs with The Onion and the Late Show with David Letterman, but they never stopped looking for the sideshow-freaky wonders of poorly made videos. By 2004 they began sharing their collection with the world in the Found Footage Festival.
The centerpiece of this year’s festival will settle one of history’s greatest debates: “We found a lot of tapes from the ’80s about the dangers of Satanism, but we found even more Jesus videos, so you’ll see montages of each,” says Prueher. “Who will come out on top, Satan or Jesus? Our show will decide once and for all.”
The battle of good versus evil will be just one of many strange delights at the festival, which will also include selections from The Late Show’s own extensive VHS collection. “I worked there for several years, and, when the show was closing up shop last year, my old colleagues were kind enough to donate Dave’s [Letterman’s] entire VHS collection,” says Prueher. While searching through hundreds of hours of video, they discovered such oddities as Mickey Rooney’s acting tips (he “yells at you for 45 minutes”), Burt Reynolds attempting an Indian accent and something with the intriguing title The Modern Goat.
As a bonus for this screening, they will be showing excerpts from The Dundee Project, a documentary about a small-town UFO festival they made with American Movie subject, the cult film director Mark Borchardt.
Stoughton natives Pickett and Prueher always make a point of stopping in Madison. “We love showing off our finds to a hometown crowd of friends, family and, usually, Art Paul Schlosser.”
