JACK: Well, there’s a technical difference: a video is an electronic image coming from the back. Film is a mechanical, magical process. Video is an electronic code; celluloid is the real thing, put into motion. Video is a washed-out shadow. A fraud. It’s also a difference in principle of the two things. Film was meant to be shown in a theater with a lot of people around. And there’s a light coming out from a projector onto a screen. There’s an element of magic somehow. Video is not at all like that. Video’s a more solitary thing. I like the mob mentality that goes with movies, having a lot of people there. I like the promo and the whole show-biz aspect of it. That’s not there on video. Video is just marketing, selling videos and catering to all these nerd-collector types who ought to go out and get a life. I hate video.
MARGARET: It does seem to come from a very different attitude.
JACK: The styles of film and video production are different now, too.
MARGARET: It’s all about figuring out what the audience enjoys and copying that.
JACK: Right. With video the technology has allowed that copying to happen much faster, but not necessarily better, which is why there was a video glut a few years ago. People just had too much. Film is more expensive and requires more time and consideration.
MARGARET: When television first came out it was supposed to be a communications medium and everyone was really excited. Everybody did these bumbling things that they really felt good about. And now television is strictly a moneymaking thing. It has no morals, no real humanity in it all. Everything’s about making money. The top story in the news will be some kid rescued from a tree.
JACK: Which is why anything that makes it to TV that has some humanity in it is like an astounding revolution.
ALEX: You’re also denying yourself access to more money by not wanting to go into video.
JACK: Right. All the money’s in video. Absolutely. But I find it completely unexciting to dupe videos and mail them out. And I think it’s bad because these movies should be shown on a big screen. Selling videos is like selling shoes. There’s nothing to it.
MARGARET: What do you think about real smalltime filmmakers who make 8mm movies, dub them onto video and sell them to people with an add in Film Threat because that’s the only way people will be able to see them? Do you think something’s better than nothing?
JACK: If filmmakers make films, they should put together some related films and try to get them played around on screens and get reviews, too. That was the old strategy of having a theatrical release for a movie. You got reviews; there’d be a huge hullabaloo about it. Soon after you’d just put it on video and make the money, but you’d have press releases. It would be a real movie because it would have been played in a theater. That was the mid-’80s, late-’80s; now filmmakers don’t bother with that. They just dump everything on video. You don’t really know what the hell you’re getting.
ALEX: Do you ever watch people’s home movies?
JACK: Home movies are really great. A lot early sex movies were home movies. They were shot by husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. They just got a camera and came up with a scenario. Gift for Santa was a great one. Santa is a guy dressed up in a totally bizarre Santa Claus outfit. He comes in on Christmas night. His girlfriend is sleeping in the bedroom. She pretends to wake up and comes out. He surprises her. At one point he sits down, goes to the bookcase and pulls out a book on Hitler’s life with a big swastika on it. Little things like that. Then he gives her a bag with a big salami; he gives her a vibrator. It’s a hilarious movie, but it’s a home movie. It’s a silent home movie that no one could re-create. I watch home movies like that. They can’t be just vacation footage.
MARGARET: These people are putting something of themselves in it. It’s bound to be more interesting.
JACK: Sometimes they can’t help but put something of themselves into it because they don’t have the money or the talent to take themselves out of it. And it’s great! They aren’t talented actors. That’s what acting is all about, putting another personality into a role. The Kuchar brothers and Warhol just let these people be themselves. They gave them minimal dialogue and created the whole school of amateur acting. And that’s still valid, I think.
MARGARET: They did stuff they thought up and laid it out there for the audience to take it any way it wants, whereas Spielberg will do all this research to figure out how the audience is going to feel.
JACK: And research screenings. Target screenings and stuff. Waters does that too now. That’s totally ridiculous in a way, shaping the film around the audience.
MARGARET: Training people to not think.
ALEX: Are you writing anything right now?
JACK: I wrote an article about the animal porno girl, Bodil Joensen. She committed suicide in the mid-’80s. I found her to be pretty fascinating because she wasn’t a porn star. She worked in animal husbandry. She just loved animals. When porno was legalized in Denmark in 1968 all these documentarians and independent filmmakers and pornographers went there to try to find something to shoot and they found her! So she made money. They paid her. She would go into her set repertoire of sex acts with animals. But she did it from such innocence, in such a straightforward way that it sort of destroyed the whole fantasy of porn. I’ve showed that film to people and they don’t like it. Because they say it looks like she’s raping the animals instead of the other way around.
ALEX: If it were the other way around it would be OK?
JACK: It made me question who I was hanging out with. Heh-heh-heh-heh! It made me question my friends at that point.
ALEX: What happened with Pandemonium? You were working with a bunch of people, right?
JACK: Not really. It was just three people. A Canadian girl did the typesetting and proofs. Pat Hollis contributed in different ways to the second and third issues. But it was mostly me. And it was too much time and money. It was like a sinkhole. But it’s the best material ever on the Kuchar brothers and Waters people, adding all the issues together.
ALEX: I like the style of how you interviewed people, too. In a couple of other underground film magazines I looked at it seemed like the writers were collecting all these facts without any context or humor.
JACK: That’s sort of the fan mentality. There’s a certain encyclopediast, collector mentality in the world of fanzines. You have to get beyond that somehow and let the subjects’ personality come out. The movie fanzines have sort of degenerated to a sterile circle. Spirit is more important.
***
This interview was originally published in the San Francisco-based fanzine Bananafish, issue 8, in 1993. Bananafish ceased publication in 2004, but certain back issues are still available through Tedium House.
***
BIOS:
MARGARET:
- Grew up in rural Iowa, attended the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Have played music since a small child.
- Have lived in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Oakland in addition to Iowa.
- Now live in rural Northern California (Mendocino County).
- Doggedly, insistently solitary, no pets, one plant. Useless job that I do well.
- The love and respect of my friends.
ALEX: At one of Jack’s San Francisco screenings long ago, I performed in Purple Oblivion; we did a couple of songs from the soundtrack of the anti-drug movie The People Next Door. It was the perfect band: only one show. Last year I received an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. My writing has appeared in Oregon Humanities, Portland Review, Propeller, Evil Monito, and other online and print publications. I’ve performed excerpts from my teen-age diaries in Mortified in Portland and San Francisco—I was a “brain butt.”
JACK: In re-reading this interview my personal opinion is it holds well and gets into the junker mentality of a true film scavenger, and I look fondly back on those days in SF. Finding all that smut and jetsam & flotsam was like finding the source of the Nile. I elaborated a bit further on this—and repeated some of the stories as I am wont to do—in the “Uncensored Confessions of a Film Collector” essay I published in Land of a Thousand Balconies for Headpress in 2003. My film collecting in the archaeological sense ended when I moved to Denmark and I no longer had access to the netherworld junk culture that flourishes in places like Detroit and SF, but on the other hand I started writing at a steady clip, partly because I was always broke and couldn’t afford to do anything else. Balconies also contains a chapter about that very same SF scene as well as on the history of Market Street Grindhouse culture, etc. But I also started to focus on Danish film subjects that I found intriguing. A list of what I’ve published:
- Desperate Visions (interviews with John Waters & the Kuchar Brothers), Creation Books, 1996
- Fleshpot: Cinema’s Sexual Myth Makers & Taboo Breakers, Headpress, 2000
- Addicted: The Myth & Menace of Drugs in Film, Creation, 2000
- Lars von Trier, British Film Institute, 2002
- Dogma Uncut, Santa Monica Books, 2003
- Land of a Thousand Balconies, Headpress, 2003
- Witchcraft Through the Ages, FAB Press, 2006
- Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden & Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s, McFarland, 2010
Next year I’m publishing a book about Screw publisher Al Goldstein, and have a number of articles on file with online magazines like Bright Lights and Senses of Cinema.
On a day-to-day basis today I operate a small cinema in Copenhagen and stay active in the local film group station16. I still present films around Europe and the U.S., many of the same films I had starting out. In the words of the old exploitation heroes, you play ’em until the sprocket holes fall off. And I still watch every second of every show with a look of idiot delight as if I had never seen them before.
In May of this year I screened my Drug show at The Silent Movie theater in LA and got to introduce The People Next Door sequences to Debra Winter’s hometown. The films still hold—they’re still as fuckin’ bizarre as ever. It’s still about showing stuff to a crowd of strangers in a dark theater. And I’m still an insufferable film purist. I carried a 35mm print over to the U.S. this May in my suitcase, the other suitcase stuffed with 16mm, could hardly move the shit. Last year I took the train from Copenhagen to Hamburg with three suitcases, hauling three 35mm prints. All I could manage to do when the train got to Hamburg was kick the fuckers off the train and wait for my party to meet me. They were simply too heavy to move anywhere. Long live celluloid!
