November 5, 1999 | At a time when the
freakish success of The Blair Witch Project may encourage even
more would-be filmmakers to borrow funding from friends and max out
their credit cards, Chris Smith's American Movie provides an
invaluable service by placing that success in its proper context. This
sometimes amusing, sometimes unsettling documentary forces us to consider
the other 99.9 percent of indie productions by neophyte auteurs. It
is not a pretty picture.
Mark
Borchardt, a gangly and goateed fellow in his early 30s, is the "hero"
of the piece. During his teenage years in a working-class Milwaukee
suburb, Borchardt drew inspiration from his favorite horror flicks -
most notably, Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre - while filming gruesome Super-8 shorts with friends and
relatives. American Movie includes snippets of these early, out-of-focus
efforts - I Blow Up and The More, The Scarier are typical
titles - to illustrate Borchardt's youthful zeal. More than a decade
and a half later, he remains every bit as enthusiastic about filmmaking.
Trouble is, there are few signs that he has gotten appreciably better
at his craft.
American
Movie introduces Borchardt as a motor-mouth under-achiever who supports
himself by delivering newspapers and doing maintenance work at a local
cemetery. For the past six years, he has worked intermittently on Northwestern,
an autobiographical black-and-white drama about drinking too much and
accomplishing too little in Milwaukee. But he remains too deep in debt
to finish this ambitious project. (At least, that's the excuse he offers
in an on-camera interview.) So Borchardt resumes work on another uncompleted
film: Coven, a supernatural horror thriller about an alcoholic
writer who runs afoul of a demonic cult.
Coven - which, for reasons never entirely clear, Borchardt insists
on mispronouncing as "KO-ven" - is intended as a self-distributed,
direct-to-video moneymaker. If he can sell 3,000 copies at $14.95 each,
Borchardt explains, he can make a profit for his investors and
raise enough money to finish Northwestern. If - and this is an
even bigger if - he can ever finish Coven.
Borchardt
comes across as almost frightfully dedicated, if not borderline crazy,
while pursuing his goals. His loving but dubious father won't lend him
any more money, and even his two brothers question whether Borchardt
should consider getting a "real" job. ("What he's best
suited for, I think," says one sibling, "is work in a factory.")
But Borchardt refuses to be sidetracked. In a sequence that is at once
screamingly funny and profoundly creepy, the wanna-be filmmaker lures
his near-senile Uncle Bill into investing a few thousand by showing
the old guy a photo of a sexy young actress. "She wants to be in
your movie, Bill," Borchardt claims. Very soon, Coven has
a brand-new executive producer.
American
Movie follows Borchardt for more than a year as Coven proceeds
along its on-again, off-again production schedule. Mike Schank, the
filmmaker's long-time friend and collaborator, is a recovering drug
and alcohol abuser who sounds chronically dazed and confused. Even so,
Schank - who has a tendency to end every statement with a nervous titter
- is the most reliable member of Borchardt's production team. Sometimes,
extras simply don't show up for key scenes, forcing the director to
make do with a smaller number of bogeymen in black hooded capes. ("Now
you guys gotta look menacing!") At other times, Borchardt must
enlist his Swedish-born mother, or a cast member - or somebody, anybody
- to operate the camera. ("You've seen a lot of movies, haven't
you? So you basically know how to frame a shot, right?") There
is retake after retake of a scene in which Borchardt - who, of course,
serves as his own star - smashes a friend's head through a kitchen cabinet
door. The friend is game, but the cabinet refuses to co-operate.
At
the center of this comedy of errors, Borchardt remains a fascinatingly
complex and often unlikable figure. He sounds peevish and condescending
as he talks about the benighted folks who earn decent salaries and live
in "sterile" houses while he suffers for his art. And he sounds
pathetically self-deluding when he cites Ingmar Bergman as one of his
major influences: "You ever see The Seventh Seal, where
they have those great dialogues in those great backgrounds? Well, that's
what I want to do here."
And
yet, in the end, you can't help sharing Borchardt's exultant sense of
accomplishment when he actually completes and premieres his 35-minute
Coven. Mind you, judging from what we see of the film, it likely
wasn't worth all the trouble. But, then again, you can view the finished
product and decide for yourself. If you log onto
americanmovie.com,
you can order your very own copy of Coven. No kidding.