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Actor/comedian and writer/director discuss their new film
For many people, time spent working in a fast-food restaurant is merely a blip on their radar as they earn some pocket money before moving on to bigger and better things.
But for Nick Prueher, his time spent working at a McDonald's in his native Wisconsin lead, inadvertently, to a career making folks laugh.
Prueher and partner in crime Joe Pickett are the hosts and curators of the Found Footage Festival, a touring show which for the past five years has shined new light on the oddest and most unintentionally hilarious videos the pair can get their hands on. The show will be coming to the Asbury Lanes in Asbury Park on Saturday (Nov. 14).
Everything from home movies to public access programs and oddly specific and unhelpful instructional videos have been shown by Prueher and Pickett over the years, and it all began with a find at Prueher's McDonald's stomping grounds.
"A friend of mine was training to become a manager and as part of that he had to watch 30 different training videos that even at the time, this was like 1991, were dated, they were like (from the) mid-80s and this one caught my eye because it was a training video for McDonald's custodians. And, at least the store we worked at, we didn't have custodians at McDonald's, we all did that, we all cleaned up the store, so I thought it was worth watching," Prueher recalled.
"So, I popped it in in the break room one day, I was by myself and I just couldn't believe how dumb it was, it just was breathtakingly, insultingly dumb and it tried to have a plot to it and it tried to have this cute little story line between a custodian's first day on the job and the overly-perky crew trainer, there was also some weird sexual tension between the two of them."
It wasn't long before Prueher brought the tape -- titled "Inside and Outside Custodial Duties" -- home to show Pickett, and eventually the pair began hosting screenings of the tape for friends.
"On a Friday night, if nothing was going on, we'd have people over my parents' living room and watch the McDonald's training video and Joe and I developed this little running commentary, this routine we did with it, and that was sort of the start of it," Prueher said. "We thought, ‘This is pretty entertaining. And if there's something this dumb right under our noses, there's got to be more tapes out there that are just collecting dust, waiting to be discovered and mocked.'"
Cut to today, with Prueher and Pickett having entertained Found Footage Festival audiences from coast to coast and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It's not all fun and games, though; it takes plenty of searching through dumpsters, garbage cans, yard sales and thrift stores and subsequent tape watching to splice together a show like the one coming to the Lanes.
"We probably have gone through hundreds of hours of tapes to find the 60 minutes of footage that we'll actually be showing at Asbury Lanes because you know, I think there's just a lot of terrible videos out there, and for them to make it in the show they have to be terrible in just the right way," Prueher explained. He also laid out his and Pickett's criteria for including a clip in the Festival:
"I think the number one (factor) is like it's got to be unintentionally funny, which is a specific type of funny; it can't be something that you were trying to be funny and got it captured on tape, it has to be like whatever it was trying to do it has to fail at doing it, so the unintentionally funny is the important part for us.
"It has to be legitimately found; you know, we think it's cheating to take a video off the internet or for somebody to say, ‘Hey, me and my friends were screwing around in a dorm room, here's the video of it,' that's, to us, just isn't as interesting so again, it's got to be a found piece of physical media, because for us the story of how something was found is sometimes just as interesting as what's on the tape, so that's another criteria we have.
"And then, this isn't like a requirement but it's something we've found that a lot of our videos have in common, maybe just because we're drawn to this, but they involve people that have a lot of ambition but not a lot of talent, and something about that combination, when those people have access to a video camera, it's magic, it's solid gold."
Among the tapes that will be seeing the light of day at the Lanes on Saturday is one that came Prueher and Pickett's way via comedian and actor David Cross, a 1987 dating service reel titled "Video Mates" featuring a string of bachelors each delivering a 90-second pitch to any interested single ladies.
"It was sort of like before internet dating this was how you did it, I guess," Prueher explained, "and it's just a remarkable time capsule of bad sweaters and really misguided ideas about how best to present yourself when you're looking to meet women and it's amazing, after watching this video, that anybody was born in 1987 if this was the dating pool that women had to choose from."
After watching hours upon hours of people who can be best described as well-intentioned but marginally-talented place themselves in front of a video camera for a public access show, an exercise video, a cheaply-made commercial or simply an awkward home movie, one has to ask, why do these people do it?
Prueher, a former research assistant on "The Late Show with David Letterman" whose resume also includes time working for "Mystery Science Theater 3000," The Onion and Entertainment Weekly, had this to say about what the appeal of being on TV might be for these folks:
"I think people, they want to be recognized, they want attention, even if it's not good attention, and being on TV does that, even if it's at 2 a.m. on a call-in show on your public access station or even if that's in like a training video or some other thing where for whatever reason they've deemed this worthy of capturing on video tape. And I guess I don't really know what the appeal is, other than that they want attention."
Prueher said that since he and Pickett started the Festival, they've made the effort to try to track down the folks featured in their videos and find out what they're up to these days.
"We're curious about the back story, so we often have people who've been in the videos at our live shows and we interview them and go to meet them and universally so far, we've been doing this show for five years, everyone we've met has been flattered by the fact that they're included in the show," Prueher said.
"It's like, even though we're poking fun at them and having some fun at their expense, I think they enjoy the fact that this footage that they usually have long-since forgotten about has propelled them into somewhat of a cult status among a select group of people, the people who come to the shows. Yeah, they're almost like cult icons and I don't know, I think they're flattered by that, even if it's for the wrong reasons."
