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	<title>The Rumpus.net &#187; Pamela Kerpius</title>
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		<title>The Rumpus Review of Tabloid</title>
		<link>http://therumpus.net/2011/07/the-rumpus-review-of-tabloid-2011/</link>
		<comments>http://therumpus.net/2011/07/the-rumpus-review-of-tabloid-2011/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:00:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Pamela Kerpius</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[film]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rumpus original]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://therumpus.net/?p=83699</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Joyce McKinney in her prime was a southern blonde bombshell spread across the British tabloids after a scandal emerged in which she was said to have captured and chained a lost male lover.  She was a tremendous star in 1977, a dubious honor from an affair she firmly denies, and retells, rather, in an absorbing [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6010/5952301884_98bf3edfbc_o.jpg" alt="" width="120" height="95" />Joyce McKinney in her prime was a southern blonde bombshell spread across the British tabloids after a scandal emerged in which she was said to have captured and chained a lost male lover. <span id="more-83699"></span> She was a tremendous star in 1977, a dubious honor from an affair she firmly denies, and retells, rather, in an absorbing and exorbitant manner.  She was in love, she says, merely going after the man who stole her heart after he was shipped away for a mission with the Mormon church.  And thus you have <em>Tabloid</em>, Errol Morris’ new documentary that is an inquiry into the fascination of tabloid exploitation, and more so into its own interview subject, whose own profile walks a fine line between exposition and exploitation.</p><p>In 1977, unbeknownst to her love, McKinney arranged a reunion with him that involved a bodyguard, a private pilot, surveillance equipment, and a substantial stack of cash that seemed to appear from nowhere.  From the outside looking in it’s enough to make for a spy thriller, not a love story.  And yet, as McKinney tells her story, smilingly, and with fluency so innocent she single-handedly makes Eddie Murphy relevant with a <em>Norbit</em> fat suit reference, you not only believe her but are endeared to her.</p><p>Morris, whose voice breaks through the fourth wall with invasive abruptness from time to time to ask her questions off screen, hardly derails her thoughts that are coming in full paragraphs and pages.  She is her own staunch and sole defender in a story that had the rest of the world reeling, and eventually questioning the very identity she put forth.  For, once we’re acquainted with her side of the story, her detractors arrive with a vengeance, giving us proof of a life beyond her fairy tale love story, including a portfolio of S&amp;M modeling that is anything but Mormon approved.<img class="alignright" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6023/5951749957_7136d982df.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="417" /></p><p>While by the end of the film you are not quite sure whose story is accurate (were those photos doctored or real?  What happened to the stockpile of photo negatives the tabloid journalists claim exist?) there’s a nagging sense that it probably doesn’t matter.  <em>Tabloid</em>—an otherwise crisply shot movie that has you enraptured with its brimming character and smartly edited collection of interview, home movie and newsreel footage—is itself a perpetuation of the very problem it investigates:  exploitation.</p><p>Its exploitation, in particular, falls along gender lines.  The only female character we meet is McKinney, who is pitted against a male journo with a penchant for peppering his phrases with the word “spread-eagled,” the private pilot who recalls the day he met McKinney wearing a see-through shirt, and a photographer for the <em>Mirror</em> in Britain who chased leads exhaustively to find nude photos of McKinney to publish.  It’s easy to malign someone who has so clearly been exploited already.  It’s almost like she’s being put on trial by a panel of men who’ve enforced the cultural standard that she exploit her sexuality for money.  Exploitation is, after all, a tabloid’s business, and Joyce McKinney was a cash cow for it.</p><p>Or maybe Joyce McKinney, with her 168 IQ score, is a smart woman who’s meticulously, just plain obsessively in control of her image, of her femininity and of her sexuality that she uses to her advantage against the patriarchy.  Is McKinney herself exploiting the business whose aim is to exploit her?  Is she mocking the tabloids?  “If you tell a lie long enough, you learn to believe it,” she says in one moment.</p><p>I am hard pressed to think someone would say such a thing if she wasn’t lying, and McKinney’s nude photos do seem real to me, yet she declares that is just not true.  All the while the debate of a tabloid’s value continues without awareness of (or at least acknowledgment of) Morris’ own accountability in the process of exploitation.  Maybe the truth of McKinney’s story will eventually come to light, but in the meantime, I reject <em>Tabloid</em>’s premise with a shrug.<br /><h3 class='related_post_title_no'>Related Posts:</h3><ul class='related_post_no'><li>No related posts&#8230;</li></ul>]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>To Absorb the Appendages of Time</title>
		<link>http://therumpus.net/2011/04/to-absorb-the-appendages-of-time/</link>
		<comments>http://therumpus.net/2011/04/to-absorb-the-appendages-of-time/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:52:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Pamela Kerpius</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[film]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rumpus original]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cave of Forgotten Dreams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chavet Cave]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[werner herzog]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://therumpus.net/?p=78537</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Werner Herzog&#8217;s Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens in theaters today.You walk out of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams overcome by the power of time. Personally, I find it almost impossible to conceptualize life in terms of time to begin with—it moves beyond my understanding, both imperceptibly slow and impossibly fast, depending on the circumstances—but [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Werner Herzog&#8217;s <em>Cave of Forgotten Dreams</em> opens in theaters today.</strong></p><p><a class="lightbox" title="Herzog1" href="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Herzog1.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-78538 alignleft" title="Herzog1" src="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Herzog1-300x180.jpg" alt="" width="126" height="76" /></a></p><p>You walk out of Werner Herzog’s <em>Cave of Forgotten Dreams</em> overcome by the power of time. Personally, I find it almost impossible to conceptualize life in terms of time to begin with—it moves beyond my understanding, both imperceptibly slow and impossibly fast, depending on the circumstances—but it is an inescapable and rather neat measurement that gives me the illusion that I can.</p><p><span id="more-78537"></span>The Chauvet Cave in southern France, the subject of Herzog’s newest documentary, is a spot brushed to obscurity on the banks of the Ardèche River, unseen by human eyes for 20,000 years, before scientists discovered it in 1994. Twenty-thousand years, 200 centuries.  Some of us might live to be one-two-thousandths as long as that cave is old, which does not include the 12,000 years it aged <em>before</em> it was closed off by a massive ice age rockslide, preserving a pristine collection of the world’s oldest cave paintings inside.</p><p>Herzog takes us into the depths of Chauvet with a 3D lens. A righteous use of a technology that has lately been demoted as mere spectacle to boost box office sales,   it’s not a gimmick here, adding a layer of visual depth to a subject that is itself stuck within the depths of the Earth. (Another smart example of this is Joe Dante’s <em>The Hole in 3D</em> that expresses depth through the physical space of a pit in the ground and the psychological space of its main character; it currently remains without a distributor.)</p><p>Buried within the depths of time, in being presented in 3D, Chauvet Cave is given a layer that comments on its long and vexing temporal life as much as its spatial nature.  In other words, Herzog’s use of 3D serves as a guide to the history and the space of this cave that, covered in stalactites and the pink, glittery glaze of minerals layered inches-thick, is truly beyond marvel.  And yet, with Herzog as our guide our gaze is never paralyzed; we wander in to this government-sanctioned preserve with liveliness—<em>Hello, Chauvet!  Tell us a story!</em></p><p>Herzog engages Chauvet.  In surveying its untouched layers with his crisp digital imagery, he asks it about the Earth’s history, about art and ourselves: what does it have to say to us after slumbering for 20,000 years?  Herzog and his crew were the first (and so far the last) to be allowed to film inside the cave, and what they reveal are skeletal remains of woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers—their remnants scattered and shattered on the earthen floor.  In other parts, the cave floor is entirely blanketed in sheets of mineral accumulation, the pate of a skull slicked over in its toothless maw.  Rippling panes of variegated quartz hang like curtains installed like found-art pieces from the ceiling.  The crowning artwork the cave fell asleep watching all those years ago is a panel of horse paintings dated 32,000 years old.  You can see the chalky finish to where they were etched.  They are tactile and fully dimensional.  It wouldn’t be enough to say the aura of the artist is left behind in these paintings; it’s more like he or she is there with us, silently unfettered by time.<a class="lightbox" title="Herzog2" href="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Herzog2.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-78539" title="Herzog2" src="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Herzog2.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="162" /></a></p><p>To bring the works full-circle with Herzog’s own presence, there is a series of eight-legged bison drawn on one panel; the extra appendages, archeologists and art historians say, are thought to be a way these artists projected a sense of motion in otherwise still imagery—Herzog calls them an example of “proto-cinema.”  As his camera tracks quietly in and out of the narrow, claustrophobic spaces and plunges its nose up against the walls as far as archeologists will allow him, the specialness of what we are witnessing becomes clear in the reflexive dialogue between the proto-cinematic images on the wall, and their reproduction dancing before us in the shadow play on the screen.</p><p>In this strange place, the clock seems to stand still.  As significant as the amount of elapsed time is in making meaning of Chauvet’s cave art, it too ceases to matter.  One of the hallmarks of a Herzog documentary is his personal engagement with his characters.  He asks them questions that don’t have obvious relevance to the story at hand.  Here, one archeologist says she took a break from work in Chauvet because its landmarks and images had become the subject of her dreams when she went to bed.  Another archeologist serenades us with a tune played on an ancient flute he found on a dig.  Neither of these subjective interludes affect our understanding of Chauvet’s historic chronology—in fact, they help us forget it.</p><p>The archeologist who dreamed of Chauvet says she took a break from work so she could “absorb the experience.”  Likewise, <em>Cave of Forgotten Dreams</em> takes us out of the crush of time in order to see all of its nuances.  In its privileged peek at this prehistoric wonder, the film only hopes that, outside of the measure of old or young, we simply go to sleep dreaming.<br /><h3 class='related_post_title'>Related Posts:</h3><ul class='related_post'><li><a href='http://therumpus.net/2009/12/morning-coffee-253/' title='Morning Coffee'>Morning Coffee</a></li><li><a href='http://therumpus.net/2009/05/short-but-striking-the-films-of-les-blank/' title='Short but Striking: The Films of Les Blank'>Short but Striking: The Films of Les Blank</a></li></ul>]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>The Rumpus Interview with Lena Dunham</title>
		<link>http://therumpus.net/2009/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-lena-dunham/</link>
		<comments>http://therumpus.net/2009/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-lena-dunham/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2009 18:50:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Pamela Kerpius</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[film]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rumpus original]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Bujalski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lena Dunham]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mumblecore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sxsw]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://therumpus.net/?p=16858</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Lena Dunham is a 22-year-old filmmaker born and raised in Manhattan under the wing of parents who are both artists and who support her endeavors like they are their own (Dunhan his currently co-writing a screenplay with her mother). Last year, while she was still a senior at Oberlin College, we spoke for the first [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-16922" title="cnf_16m1" src="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/cnf_16m1-300x187.jpg" alt="cnf_16m1" width="180" height="112" />Lena Dunham is a 22-year-old filmmaker born and raised in Manhattan under the wing of parents who are both artists and who support her endeavors like they are their own (Dunhan his currently co-writing a screenplay with her mother). <span id="more-16858"></span>Last year, while she was still a senior at Oberlin College, <a href="http://scarlettcinema.blogspot.com/2008/02/women-arent-funny-lena-dunham-talks.html">we spoke</a> for the first time; then, she was in the midst of a comedy web TV series called <em><a href="http://www.nerve.com/video/Video.aspx?VideoGroupId=38">Tight Shots</a></em> that details the trials of young movie-making (and sex-having) sprung forth in eager collaboration with the adult world.  As 2008 progressed, Dunham graduated and began work on getting her first feature film, <em>Creative Nonfiction</em>, out on the festival circuit; it <a href="http://www.sxsw.com/film/screenings/schedule/?a=show&amp;s=F15496">premiered at SXSW</a> in March, and Dunham has also created web TV series, about a hipster art school brat pack of Manhattanites, called <a href="http://www.pistolskillponies.com/series/delusional-downtown-divas/"><em>Delusional Downtown Divas.</em></a> We talked again recently about the torture of day jobs, the reality of creative output, and her crush on filmmaker Andrew Bujalski.</p><p><strong><br />The Rumpus: </strong>What are you up to?  Do you have a day job now, or have you been able to keep up without one?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>I feel like I have two day jobs.  Because I end up doing videos and movie stuff and it pays occasionally, but never enough.  So I also do a lot of random crap.  I do some writing for The Onion AV Club and other film culture blogging, and as you know, if and when that stuff pays it never pays enough; so I also baby-sit and work in a children’s clothing store.  Which is actually a lot of fun!  I love it—my two best friends work there also.  So I kind of cobble it all together that way.  I feel like I’m lucky.  I rent an office where I do all my work, but I live with my family.  Having an apartment to live in New York that remains rent-free—my parents have not even conceived of charging me rent—is amazing.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>How did <em>Delusional Downtown Divas</em> come together?  Was it something you were thinking about while you were still in school, or is this a totally post-college project?</p><p><object width="425" height="344" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/VXM6FOzo4RU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/VXM6FOzo4RU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /></object></p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>It was a totally post-college project.  I got back from school and I started spending a lot of time with my friends—the one who plays Joana—and another, who are girls that I’ve known since preschool and who both went to art school.  They had sort of forgotten what it was like to be at Oberlin for me, which is a wonderful, but granola place; but their characters are, I guess you would say, more flamboyant than what I was used to.  So I came up with this concept, just really loose, about these girls who want to become part of the art world.  The girls I know are very cool, so it wasn’t funny to base it on them strictly.  I realized the premise wasn’t funny if they were actually cool girls, they would have to be ridiculous.  I told them, “I’m not making fun of you, it’s just that the characters have to be ridiculous if we’re going to get anything out of this.”  Anyway, I pitched this idea to them thinking it would just be a fun thing to play around with and shoot a couple skits, but they ended up being receptive.  So I wrote up an outline, we met up and discussed it, I got Sara [Rossein] on board—the cinematographer—and it totally took off from there.  It took on a life of its own and ended up being a lengthier project than expected.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>How did the screening go?  When was it again that it premiered, I want to say last fall?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>We premiered it on January 9, 2009. That was one of the crazier nights of my life because we finished editing at 5 ‘o clock that morning—we had all of these tech issues.  We finally finished the DVD transfer and, I’m not kidding, the show was opening at 6:00 p.m. and I dropped it off at 5:55 p.m.  I just prayed it would work!  I pressed “play” on the DVD player and left to go home and take a shower.  I probably shouldn’t say this, but I hadn’t showered in seven days, because I had been just trying to finish it under this absurdly quick deadline; I wanted to just throw on a dress and not take a shower and my dad was like, “Lena, you, for various reasons, cannot do that.  You smell bad.”  So I went back having taken a shower, and I guess I got there at 6:45 p.m. and it was just packed.  Like, like—like, people were spilling onto the streets, and I could not believe it.  People were so nice and receptive, it felt like being queen for a day.  I probably won’t have a better experience than that again!  Anyway, it was really great.  People came in throughout the week and we just chilled on this couch, ate snacks, and waited for people to come around and watch the show.<strong></strong></p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong><a href="http://www.teenvogue.com/style/blogs/fashion/2009/01/first-look-at-matthew-williamson-for-hm-lena-dunham-pokes-fun-at-downtown-and-tokyo-takes-new-york.html">Teen Vogue</a> put up a piece on it, right?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>So I think that’s where the girls come from.  One girl who was like 14, named Hazel, wrote and said something like, “I hate high school.  I watch your show and it makes me feel better.”</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>Aww.</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>I was like, you’re probably a creepy 40-year-old man but you’re making me so happy right now!</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>How do you know the guest characters on <em>Divas</em>, like Isaac Mizrahi, for instance?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>He is someone my mom has known for a long time because she was close friends with a business partner of his.  My mom did some fashion photography stuff with him, so she got to know him because he’s very much around the art world.  I met him a few times when I was a kid, and I sent him an email and he was totally receptive—like, incredibly receptive to doing the show.  We shot his part in maybe 15 minutes because he had, just, no time.  He would have liked to give us more, but he just couldn’t.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>Did you have to wear his Target line in the show?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>I would have loved to!  When we were there Isabel, the girl who plays Agnes, kept grabbing stuff and saying, “I could borrow this and we could put it in one of our episodes,” and I was like, “Nice try.”  But I am a huge fan of his Target line.  I actually told him, “Look, you have single-handedly revolutionized my work wardrobe.”</p><p>People are shockingly open to little cameos like this.  Everyone we asked, I was petrified to ask, and nobody said no.  We had a few not respond, but nobody said no.  People were nice and responded and were open.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>What is it like working with <a href="http://www.lauriesimmons.net/">your mother</a>?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>You know, it’s weird because the issues—like her creative brain is really appealing to me, so that part of it is great; and the fights we have are so silly, they are about one of us saying, “You said you were going to work and now you’re sitting here watching TV with a towel around your head!  How am I supposed to take you seriously?”—so the issues arise from feeling so casual with each other that it’s hard to find conflict.  There’s something about having a collaborator who is not your mom that you feel some responsibility to them, and you have to keep the schedule you set.  But if it’s my mom then it can get a little lax.  As far as a creative relationship, I am so into her and what she does, and she’s very respectful of the things I make.  So that part of it is great, once we can get ourselves to sit down with it.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>There are plenty of people, myself included, who don’t have a relationship with their parents where they can have intellectual exchanges, let alone creative ones.  To me, your relationship is really profound.  Do you think it’s because of your parents’ own art background, that both of them being in that industry makes them automatically interested in your work and curious about what you’re working on?</p><p><strong>Dunham:</strong> I think that’s part of it.  I am realizing more and more that the things I make are either with my parents or about my parents, and I am definitely trying to expand.  My dad said, “I love what you do but I don’t need to be a part of it all the time.”  He is much more comfortable observing it than being thrust into it.  They have an understanding of whatever the process of trying to get something made is.  That’s helpful to me because even when they’re not contributing directly they’re always advising, and that’s really excellent.  There are so many people who find the artistic process to be so mysterious, a lot of people are afraid of, say, creative block or something, so it’s been interesting for me to see people who have been making work for a long time, pretty consistently, and see what issues they come up against.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>What issues do they meet?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>Well, for example, both of my parents have had long phases where they’re intensely productive and phases where it feels like months and months of “getting ready to work.”  It’s too scary to say “I’m not working,” but “getting ready” softens things.  Seeing the ebbs and flows and just the output is one of the biggest things I’ve noticed.  Also, the issues my mom comes up against come from being a small business owner; it’s something I didn’t realize until recently, and a part of work that I’m starting to manage more of on my own.  There are times when I feel like my job is just addressing envelopes and mailing out screeners.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>What are some other influences on your movie making these days?  Do you watch a lot of Mumblecore?  I ask about the latter specifically because I’ve noticed certain similarities between your work and that movement, though there are distinct differences.</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>It’s interesting because one of my favorite filmmakers is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1216004/">Andrew Bujalski</a> who I just met for the first time when I was at SXSW in a total, doofy fan-girl moment; but that was a huge thing for me.  Creative Nonfiction was the thing that got written right after I saw an Andrew Bujalski movie.  He’s a big part of the “Mumblecore” moment, or whatever people want to refer to that as, but I think if I’ve been informed by so-called Mumblecore movies then that’s because those are the filmmakers who have dared to make movies for nothing; I’ve talked to Barry [Jenkins] about this, which is that, it’s good if for no other reason than it got made, and the people who didn’t have the money to make a movie made a movie.  I also think it appeals to me because of those subtle depictions of human relations that this kind of movie making allows.  But I’m also interested in comedy; I’m interested in broad comedy, and I’m also interested in satire and other elements that maybe wouldn’t be the first thing you think of when you think of a Mumblecore movie.</p><p><object width="425" height="344" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/_YU0fEdROX0&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_YU0fEdROX0&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /></object></p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>I think that’s the thing about your movies that separates it from Mumblecore.  I agree with you that the process of a movie getting made at all is something incredible; but the difference for me with your movies is that there are actually people in them who are trying to, or who are articulating something.  Your characters complete their thoughts.  And in terms of comedy, the timing in your films is really sharp; with Mumblecore the comedy is muddied to the point that, as the name suggests, the characters are mumbling.</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>I really love writing and I love writers.  For example, Andrew Bujalski really writes, his movies are written.  And there are some, like Joe Swanberg movies, many of which I like, are not written in the same way.  They’re more written in the editing room.  That’s something I respect; it’s a way of working that I’ve tried, but I have realized that the script is a really valuable thing to me.  I really like the idea of what Mumblecore is giving birth to, I like the debate that its started, I like some of the movies that have come out of it and it’s getting more and more interesting as more people take things from it; but also, I diverge and apply it to something like a genre film and things like that.</p><p>It’s a major jumping off point when we think about how digital cinema is defined.  Digital is something so much more financially accessible to people, and maybe more eco-friendly too.</p><p>I think Mumblecore is recession friendly, and that’s appealing.  I think it’s like a perfect media storm: a few filmmakers hit the big time, and then there’s all the backlash that automatically accompanies a movement.  Hmm.  I just can’t say enough about how much I like Andrew Bujalski.  I really am a little obsessed.</p><p>He actually came to see my movie and the whole time I was peering between the seats to see “Is he laughing?  Is he smiling?” When I met him I tried to play it pretty cool and I said to my friend [editor, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1477623/">Nat Sanders</a>] that I had this really doofy fan-girl moment and I was just mortified, and he said, “Well, at least you can feel a little original.  I don’t know how many insane fan-girls that Andrew Bujalski really has.”  He told me I shouldn’t feel too embarrassed about it.</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>He’s all yours.</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>Yeah, I know.  It’s not like following John Mayer!</p><p><strong>Rumpus: </strong>And how did the screening at SXSW go then?</p><p><strong>Dunham: </strong>It was great actually.  I went to the festival not expecting to sell my movie, which is good because I didn’t.  There weren’t that many sales that happened at the festival, but I also know that mine was a weird movie and was a weird length, so I wasn’t expecting to sell it or get an agent out of it.  My biggest hope was just to meet interesting people who I might want to work with in the future, see a lot of movies, get a few reviews, and all of those things happened.<br /><h3 class='related_post_title'>Related Posts:</h3><ul class='related_post'><li><a href='http://therumpus.net/2011/07/rombes-reviews-tao-lin-and-megan-boyle-film/' title='Rombes Reviews Tao Lin and Megan Boyle Film'>Rombes Reviews Tao Lin and Megan Boyle Film</a></li><li><a href='http://therumpus.net/2010/12/notable-new-york-this-week-1214-1219/' title='Notable New York, This Week 12/14 &#8211; 12/19'>Notable New York, This Week 12/14 &#8211; 12/19</a></li><li><a href='http://therumpus.net/2010/03/the-rumpus-sunday-book-blog-roundup-31/' title='The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup'>The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup</a></li><li><a href='http://therumpus.net/2010/03/sxsw-and-monofonus/' title='SXSW and Monofonus'>SXSW and Monofonus</a></li><li><a href='http://therumpus.net/2009/03/note-from-austin/' title='THE EDITOR&#8217;S DESK: Note From Austin— How to Make Money in the Arts, Selling You Back Your Dreams, the Rise of the Middle Class Artist'>THE EDITOR&#8217;S DESK: Note From Austin— How to Make Money in the Arts, Selling You Back Your Dreams, the Rise of the Middle Class Artist</a></li></ul>]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>The IT Auteur: The Rumpus Interview with Josh Weinberg</title>
		<link>http://therumpus.net/2009/04/the-it-auteur-the-rumpus-interview-with-josh-weinberg/</link>
		<comments>http://therumpus.net/2009/04/the-it-auteur-the-rumpus-interview-with-josh-weinberg/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:14:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Pamela Kerpius</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[film]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Original Content]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rumpus original]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://therumpus.net/?p=14348</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Josh Weinberg is a Denver-based tech support geek turned independent filmmaker who released his first web-based comedy video The Website Is Down: Sales Guy VS. Web Dude last spring to coast-to-coast reverberations of laughter. The frame is filled by a computer screen being manned by an unnamed tech support guru, the proxy of an outdated [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/website_is_down-01.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-14702" title="website_is_down-01" src="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/website_is_down-01-300x225.jpg" alt="website_is_down-01" width="108" height="81" /></a>Josh Weinberg is a Denver-based tech support geek turned independent filmmaker who released his first web-based comedy video <a href="http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com"><em>The Website Is Down: Sales Guy VS. Web Dude</em></a> last spring to coast-to-coast reverberations of laughter.<span id="more-14348"></span> The frame is filled by a computer screen being manned by an unnamed tech support guru, the proxy of an outdated <em>Halo</em> hero.  He shoots enemies and trouble-shoots for a contentious sales employee who doesn’t know the difference between the company website and the Internet, who shrieks when his desktop icons are scrambled out of phallus form, and who is stuck in the sedimentary layers of simultaneously-running Windows 95 applications.  The series is akin to <em>The Office</em> in tone, though we never see the complacent characters behind their cubicle walls.</p><p><object width="600" height="450" data="http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/swf/fpd.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethewebsiteisdown%2Ecom%2Fswf%27%2CcontrolsOverVideo%3A%27ease%27%2CmenuItems%3A%5B0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C1%2C1%2C1%5D%2CshowStopButton%3Atrue%2CinitialScale%3A%27fit%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%279999%27%2Cname%3A%27%27%2CautoRewind%3Atrue%2CstartingBufferLength%3A1%2CautoBuffering%3Afalse%2Cloop%3Afalse%2CsplashImageFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fimages%2Fexcelhell%5Fthumb%2Ejpg%27%2CautoPlay%3Afalse%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fflv%2Feh539%5F592x448%2Emp4%27%7D" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="bgcolor" value="111111" /><param name="src" value="http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/swf/fpd.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethewebsiteisdown%2Ecom%2Fswf%27%2CcontrolsOverVideo%3A%27ease%27%2CmenuItems%3A%5B0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C1%2C1%2C1%5D%2CshowStopButton%3Atrue%2CinitialScale%3A%27fit%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%279999%27%2Cname%3A%27%27%2CautoRewind%3Atrue%2CstartingBufferLength%3A1%2CautoBuffering%3Afalse%2Cloop%3Afalse%2CsplashImageFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fimages%2Fexcelhell%5Fthumb%2Ejpg%27%2CautoPlay%3Afalse%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fflv%2Feh539%5F592x448%2Emp4%27%7D" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /></object>Weinberg hit the refresh button on the uncanny IT department dramas, releasing his follow-up, <em>Excel Hell</em>, in March.  In the new episode, Chip the Sales Guy is at the helm, electrifying his coworkers with a dangerous game of Minesweeper and downloading the “MILF” computer virus.  Even though Weinberg takes clear aim at the absurdity of the typical day-worker’s pleading and often pathetic help desk requests, his comedy reaches across the interface for a far-from-condescending lecture on how to work your hard drive.  I spoke to Weinberg recently to talk about how the series was born, the name “Chip,” and his thoughts on independent film.<a href="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/twid21_05-over.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14454" title="twid21_05-over" src="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/twid21_05-over.jpg" alt="twid21_05-over" width="117" height="156" /></a></p><p><strong>The Rumpus</strong>: What sparked the idea for <a href="http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/">The Website is Down</a>?</p><p><strong>Weinberg:</strong> For a long time I had an idea about making a movie that took place on the screen of someone working at a computer. I thought it would be cool to see that, watching the story only through the actions onscreen.  Originally, I had this idea when I was in school getting my computer science degree. At the time the it was not going to be a comedy, but a mystery where you would watch someone uncovering a secret, like detecting a hacker or whatever.  It was going to be all text, all Unix commands, but only ultra-geeky people would know what the fuck it was about.  So I never did that!  It would be like the advanced version of <em>The Website is Down</em>.<a href="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/josh4jd.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-14455" title="josh4jd" src="http://therumpus.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/josh4jd-300x266.jpg" alt="josh4jd" width="300" height="266" /></a></p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>That sounds incredibly tedious.</p><p><strong>Weinberg:</strong> Oh, yeah.  But then again, no more tedious than making any other movie.  It would just present its own unique set of problems.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus:</strong> It would be the in-your-face version of <em>The Website is Down</em> for all of the people not IT-proficient?<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Weinberg:</strong> That’s right.  Like, “This isn’t for you, you plebeians.”  So again, that didn’t happen.  Really, it’s been more fun doing it as a comedy; obviously more people can appreciate it that way.  I had the idea for [<em>The Website is Down</em>] in my head for a very long time and finally the pieces just fell into place.  I’ve been making a lot of movies with Casey [Cochran], who also works in tech support, so he completely understood the characters and scenario.  He plays Chip Moorhead, the Sales Guy.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>It’s a great character name, “Chip.”  There’s something annoying about it, it’s a little grating.<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>It’s an annoying name for sure.  It came about when I was speeding up the character voices, I thought about making them sound like chipmunks.  That’s where the name “Chip” comes from.  We try to throw in the most third-grade humor as possible.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>Tell me more about your other actors, do they have a background in IT and tech support too?<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>Yes, Casey’s a tech support guy, I’ve worked in tech support for a long time, and then there’s Jesse Johnson, he’s not in tech support, but he is a film guy with an oddball sense of humor.  In the first video he plays the character calling in from the City of Arvada [Colorado].  I didn’t tell him to do any of that stuff about the mayor.  I just said “You’re going to call me and tell me the website is down.”  He did three takes, all of them different and off-the-cuff, and all of them hilarious.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>What was your process for writing the show?  How long did it take?</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>In total it took two-and-a-half months for the final product.  I wrote <em>The Website is Down</em> over a period of, maybe, two weeks; it took another two or three weeks to record, and another month to put it together—and a lifetime of experience and frustration in tech support for all the material.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>One time I called my IT department because there were fingerprints on my screen and I couldn’t find any cleaning wipes.</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>[Laughs]  Oh, god.  Casey would love you.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>It was a personal low.</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>There’s an area on the website called <a href="http://dpt.thewebsiteisdown.com/dpt/view/dcfh">“The Datacenter From Hell”</a> where people have written in some funny stories.  There is one about an executive who called his IT guy and told him his mouse didn’t work; the IT guy asked him, “Well, is it plugged in?”  He said, “No, it’s not.”  So the IT guy asked him, “Do you still want me to come down there?”  And he said yes!</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>Are you a gamer in real life?</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>I get addicted to stupid games.  I’ll play one game intensely for short time and then delete it.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>Like <em>Bejeweled</em> on Yahoo! Games?  That’s a popular-stupid one.  It’s like <em>Tetris</em> but you switch jewels around.</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>I never got into that one!</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>You might try it out.</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>Maybe I will.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>Well, if your interests are stupid games, anyway.</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>Yeah, I don’t know about that.  I’ve been trying not to play as many lately.  At the time of the first episode of <em>The Website is Down</em> I was playing Halo a lot.  In the movie what you see is the first version of <em>Halo</em> that was put out like five years ago.  Pretty much anyone playing <em>Halo</em> online is doing it because a) they downloaded a hack copy of it and are too cheap to buy the newest version; or b) they’re kids and adults who find an oddball community together.  You find some characters on there.</p><p><em>Halo</em> is interesting—the first version—because as an original multiplayer game it had no voice chat like a lot of games have now.  It was all text-based.  You could talk to other people but you had to type it, and that honed your shit-talking skills, and how to type and play at the same time.  I was thinking about the idea of the movie when I got a call from my boss as I was playing it one day—and that’s funny because my boss is calling me right now!</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>Do you have to take it?</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>No, he can wait.  So anyway, I get this call and I’m trying to play <em>Halo</em> and, you know, at the same time that I’m trying to de-bug some problem: I’m busy trying to cut somebody down in the game and make it sound like I am paying attention to the guy on the phone.  To me, that was pretty entertaining.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>It sounds like you have nostalgia for these older video games.  Even the idea of trying to make a movie that’s entirely in computer code, in something like DOS before there was Windows, is pretty committed to the old school.</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>Yeah, that’s what got me into computers in the first place.  I always thought there was something really cool about typing and watching it show up on the TV.  For whatever reason, that really got me.  I used to play all of those text adventure games where you type, for instance, “Look at the house,” and it would give you a description of the house.  They were fun.  I definitely have nostalgia and it comes through in the series—like the use of Wolfenstein 3D in the new video, <em>Excel Hell</em>.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus:</strong> Do you play any new video games?</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>I tried to get into <em>World of Warcraft</em> because I was thinking of using it for one of the new episodes, but it’s not exactly my thing.  I kind of ended up making more fun of it than I did appreciating it.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>As an indie yourself, what kind of independent films or shows do you watch?</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>I watch a lot of <em>Aqua Teen Hunger Force</em>.  I watch a lot of Adult Swim; they recently had an explosion of, not bad, but bizarre shows.  I think what they did was say, “We have a million dollars.  Instead of spending it on one show and making it look like a million-dollar show, let’s spend it on 30 shows and have them all look like shit.”   They shoot out all this stuff, find whatever works, and then cancel all the rest.</p><p>I think the web has really lowered the standards for appearance in video; and people have lowered their expectations of production values, so it doesn’t bother them as much if it looks bad.  For me it’s always been more a matter of content than of the look or style.  A lot of people do get off on the look of things—like films trying to replicate, say, a comic book style, or some other stylistic—but I think that happens a lot of times at the expense of plot or character, and the art of storytelling.  I’d gladly trade the look for all of those things.  That’s one of the benefits of cheap production equipment that, yeah, you do get plenty of crap, but you also get a lot of stuff with everything there but the polished look.  And I’m cool with that.</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>Is this something you’ve noticed, in terms of production quality, in the film submissions to the festival you co-created, <a href="http://www.firstlookfest.com/">The First Look Student Film Festival</a>?</p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>That’s where I realized that production quality is not more important than anything else.  I am, and the rest of the festival audience is very accepting of low production values if the acting is good, the storytelling is good, and the plot and writing is good.  Those things are so key that if it looks bad—especially if the filmmaker takes advantage of the “bad” look and gives some reason that it looks the way it does—then it’s perfect.  But even if filmmakers don’t do that, I’m still pretty forgiving of low production value.</p><p>But I’m not biased against student films with higher production values either.  Just because it looks good doesn’t mean I automatically suspect it’s going to have flaws in other departments.  But sometimes, I think, in film schools the focus is on the production aspects only because that’s the easiest thing to teach.  You can teach people all of these standard technical details about lighting, about the camera, about how editing works, and that stuff is just a set of facts.   What’s hard to teach is writing, storytelling, acting—the more personal things.  Whether it’s the film school’s fault or the students’ fault, I don’t know; but they focus on the stuff that’s easy.  The part that’s hard is, well, the student’s may not have learned it yet.  They’re young.  So the content we have focused on in our festival is film that work as film, that emotionally, once you’re done watching it you feel like you’ve experienced something.</p><p>Are you writing all of this?</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>No, it’s recording.<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>I was wondering, because I’ve been talking a long time.  That reminds me, did you see the <em>Onion</em> article with the headline, <a href="link: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/everything_taking_too_long">“Everything Taking Too Long”</a> and there’s a picture of guy staring at a microwave waiting for his food?</p><p>[Laughter]</p><p><strong>The Rumpus: </strong>A perfect segue back to your web series:  “This is taking too long, it won’t work!  Come fix it!”<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Weinberg: </strong>God.<br />**<br /><object width="572" height="430" data="http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/swf/fpd.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethewebsiteisdown%2Ecom%2Fswf%27%2CstreamingServer%3A%27lighttpd%27%2CcontrolsOverVideo%3A%27ease%27%2CmenuItems%3A%5B0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C1%2C1%2C1%5D%2CshowStopButton%3Atrue%2CinitialScale%3A%27fit%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%279999%27%2Cname%3A%27%27%2CautoRewind%3Atrue%2CstartingBufferLength%3A1%2CautoBuffering%3Afalse%2Cloop%3Afalse%2CsplashImageFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fimages%2Fsalesguy%5Fthumb%2Ejpg%27%2CautoPlay%3Afalse%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fflv%2Fsalesguy2%2Eflv%27%7D" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="bgcolor" value="111111" /><param name="src" value="http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/swf/fpd.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethewebsiteisdown%2Ecom%2Fswf%27%2CstreamingServer%3A%27lighttpd%27%2CcontrolsOverVideo%3A%27ease%27%2CmenuItems%3A%5B0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C1%2C1%2C1%5D%2CshowStopButton%3Atrue%2CinitialScale%3A%27fit%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%279999%27%2Cname%3A%27%27%2CautoRewind%3Atrue%2CstartingBufferLength%3A1%2CautoBuffering%3Afalse%2Cloop%3Afalse%2CsplashImageFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fimages%2Fsalesguy%5Fthumb%2Ejpg%27%2CautoPlay%3Afalse%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fbitcast%2Da%2Ebitgravity%2Ecom%2Fwebsitedown%2Fflv%2Fsalesguy2%2Eflv%27%7D" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /></object><br /><h3 class='related_post_title_no'>Related Posts:</h3><ul class='related_post_no'><li>No related posts&#8230;</li></ul>]]></content:encoded>
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