You’ve seen America’s Funniest Home Videos. The Found Footage Festival is kind of like that, but weirder. Its creators bill it as “the world’s largest collection of strange, outrageous and profoundly stupid videos.”
The show is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a tour, which stops by Hamtramck’s Planet Ant on Sunday.
The festival is the brainchild of New York-based Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, who grew up together in Wisconsin before finding work in comedy (Prueher at The Colbert Report and The Late Show with David Letterman, Pickett at The Onion).
The two friends had long collected random video tapes before deciding to make a festival out of them. “It was spring 2004 when we decided to take these VHS tapes that we’ve been showing to friends in crummy apartments out of a living room and put it in the back of a bar,” Prueher tells Metro Times. “People showed up, and they still are for some reason.”
Prueher says his collection started in earnest in the early ’90s, when he was working at a McDonald’s store and was forced to watch a training video for janitorial duties. “It was just so remarkable,” he says of the tape. “They tried to add their own mythology to it… The crew trainer told the [trainee] that if he cleaned extra well, he can hope to one day ‘See McC.’ And it was never quite explained whether ‘McC’ was a concept, a person, or a state of being.”
Prueher says the new show features selections from exercise videos (including a Christian workout called Believercise) and a mysterious New Age tape called Elimination: The First Step.
While the latter may sound cultish and possibly apocalyptic, Prueher says it’s even stranger than that.
“It’s nothing drastic, but essentially it’s a New Age guru who has a program you can take to have better bowel movements,” he explains. “He somehow convinced a seminar full of people in a hotel somewhere to take this class on how to ‘eliminate better.’ ... We did a supercut of him talking about shitting, essentially.”
Prueher says after watching hours of raw tapes, he and Pickett edit the footage down. “I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody to have to watch these the way we do in their raw form,” he says. “We’re gluttons for punishment.”
He adds, “You can get creative with the editing. ... We put them into digestible chunks, little three-minute segments for people to enjoy, and have a running commentary of jokes and observations.”
They have even hired a private detective to track down some of the people from the videos for follow-ups.
Much of the videos in the festival are sourced from VHS tapes.
“Because that’s sort of what the golden age of home video was,” Prueher says. “It was such a unique thing where people didn’t know what they were doing, and so cheap to do that all these mom-and-pop operations come in and make these hyper-specific tapes that they thought nobody outside of their community would ever see.”
Prueher says he plans to scour Detroit-area thrift stores for new tapes while he’s in town, but adds that Found Footage Fest attendees are welcome to bring their strange video finds to Planet Ant.
“We always accept donations,” he says. “We’re only in the Detroit area once a year. ... So let us know what you find.”
