American Movie - Any Thoughts?

Here are two articles about American Movie.  The first is an interview with Mark Borchardt and Mike Shank given right about the time the movie came out - in 2000. The second is a review of the film around the same time. Read them both. I have a question for you at the end.

Arts: Film: The loser who made Milwaukee famous

Mark Borchardt was an obsessive, alcoholic, no-hoper, wannabe film director. Then someone made a documentary about him.

Fiona Morrow. The Independent. London (UK): Jun 23, 2000. pg. 1 Copyright Newspaper Publishing Plc Jun 23, 2000

There isn't much we don't already know about the American Dream: it's been served up by Hollywood since the moguls discovered California. Yet despite all candy-coated make-believe, it has retained its currency; there are still millions of Americans daring to dream the impossible dream. Mark Borchardt is one of them. An intelligent guy from a Milwaukee backwater, Borchardt has fancied himself as a film-maker since he was a kid with a Super 8 camera.

Brought up on low expectations, he took the factory jobs, cleaned the crematorium, delivered newspapers, married the wrong girl, had three kids, split up and wound up back at mom and dad's place, all the time imagining his movie.

The early films were typical teenage boy stuff: quick horror flicks with titles such as The More the Scarier, and The More The Scarier III. His friends had nothing better to do, so everyone helped out. The same friends were happy to muck in when he began his first serious short film Coven, and started talking about his feature film, Northwestern. Director Chris Smith met Borchardt at a film festival and, intrigued by the enthusiastic self-promotion on display, asked if he might follow the progress of Northwestern in a documentary. Borchardt agreed, and four years later, American Movie won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance festival.

It isn't hard to see why. Borchardt is the perfect documentary subject: an obsessive, passionate, borderline psychotic alcoholic. He is also very articulate, knows his movies and is apparently capable of persuading almost anyone to do almost anything.

His family and friends are worth the ticket too: Uncle Bill, the ancient coot, plenty rich, but living in a trailer; mom, extra, sometime camera operator; Kenny, the jailbird associate producer; and Mike Shank, Borchardt's brain-dead best friend and the other star of the show. If you haven't already worked it out, I should point out that American Movie is hilarious.

Still, I was slightly apprehensive about interviewing Borchardt and Shank. I knew from the film that Borchardt could be extremely belligerent. But it was Shank who really worried me. Shank, the one- time drug user and alcoholic, has wound up with a fried brain. What the hell were we going to talk about?

I concentrate on Borchardt. He's been drinking all day, but is obviously on a high from the press attention. American Movie has played well in the States, and his telephone has been ringing with job offers and potential investors for months. His short film Coven has sold nearly 3,000 copies via the American Movie website, and, bizarrely, talk show host, David Letterman has made him the Late Show's political correspondent. Not bad for a kid from Menomenee Falls, Milwaukee.

I begin with the obvious opener: Did he ever imagine the documentary would lead to all this?

"Not at all," he replies. "You don't set yourself up for the fall. I knew something would come of it, but I didn't anticipate this, sitting here, in London, being interviewed. Cool man". He speaks in a very particular, skewed vernacular. The delivery is intense and small talk is not his thing. But has all this media attention distracted him from his dream to make Northwestern?

"Oh absolutely, but along with that distraction has come women and money and that's so great, too, man. The heart grows and yearns and says you've really got to make the film you want to make, so just by natural momentum, you come back to it. Of course this has been distracting - you have all the money in the world to drink - but this fall I start shooting." When I ask Borchardt if he has he managed to finance Northwestern on the back of American Movie, the strength of his personality comes to the fore. His reply is delivered like a steam train, barely stopping to draw breath.

"The money for Northwestern means nothing, because money can't make a good script. It hit me all of a sudden: I'm gonna raise $70- 100,000 on my own and shoot the film. I've had plenty of legitimate offers and I never responded to any of them, because this is a personal film and I don't want no dude putting in money and then turning around and saying, `by the way can my girlfriend be in it?', or any of that crap. It's just going to be me, waking up one morning this fall, grabbing a cup of coffee, picking up the camera and a tripod and taking off down some lonely rural road."

It sounds hopelessly romantic, but Borchardt is completely wrapped up in the mythology of the film-maker as great artist. He doesn't want to be the next Quentin Tarantino. He wants to make cinema "like Kubrick and Fellini, Godard and Polanski. American Movie has absolutely nothing to do with my work. It has exposed me to Letterman, people from Hollywood and New York sending me scripts and flying me out to auditions and all that crap. But remember, you're responsible for your own push-ups, your own sit-ups and your own daily writing, man. It's completely free and comes from your own self- discipline. Celebrity is to screw as many women as possible and to pay for good beer, that's all that's worth". The film paints him as something of a procrastinator, did he recognise himself on screen?

"Yep. This drunk dude walking around. But I also saw a talented, determined person in a set of circumstances that don't usually allow for those things to occur. I don't know what other people are thinking and I don't care. I'm after my American Dream and I'm starting to live it."

We talk about movies for a while - how much Borchardt hates them, particularly when he's on a drinking streak as he has been all year - when, out of nowhere, Shank pipes up. "Mark likes anything with black girls in it. I've never met anyone in my whole life who likes black girls as much as Mark. All day, like 50 times a day he's going, `Man, there's another black girl.' When he looks for magazines he purposefully picks out the ones with black girls in them." This is revelation is delivered in dead-pan monotone, and leaves me floundering. Luckily Borchardt rises to the bait.

"Well dude, of course I'm gonna take what I like. Do you arbitrarily take out magazines?"

Shank: "For Christmas I bought him a calendar, but I should have got him this Playboy Women of Colour. I think next year you can be expecting that."

Borchardt: "Oh, that would be totally cool dude, definitely."

I'm staring at two men dressed like the boys you ignored at school - Iron Maiden T-shirts, too much hair - talking about porn as if it they were discussing their favourite cereal. I manage to stop goldfishing long enough to ask Shank if he felt at all exploited by his portrayal in American Movie.

"If you ask me I was accurately portrayed and I'd rather have the audience response it gets - the laughter and all that. I'm just a guy with a brain. I got a friend at AA who was shooting $2,700 of cocaine into the base of his skull everyday and they had to cut out a third of his brain, and he functions more normally than I do.

The success of American Movie has inevitably changed Borchardt's life: he's been offered a part in Todd Solodnz's next film. "I'm considering it as a job opportunity, but I won't go if Mark can't come with me." So, Hollywood looms for both of them?

Borchardt: "I've gotta do some stuff out there, and there's some weird, great stuff happening, but I would never take it seriously. I'm not going to be corrupted. I'd like to screw a bunch of chicks, but I'm not gonna get sucked in." The American Dream lives on all right.

Movie Review; 'American Movie'

Turns Camera on Indie Filmmaker

 
Kevin Thomas. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Nov 12, 1999. pg. 18
 
(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1999 all Rights reserved)
 
Chris Smith's "American Movie," which took the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Sundance this year, is sure to draw lots of laughs. Here's this small-town Wisconsin guy, Mark Borchardt, trying to make a movie on a shoestring with the help of some pals, in particular his spacey, shaggy musician friend Mike Schank, while coaxing money out of his frail, bleary 82-year-old uncle Bill Borchardt. These people say and do goofy things from time to time, and they all sound like the people in "Fargo."
 
Chroniclers of the independent filmmaking scene, however, may not be so easily amused. We know all too well that the world has an abundance of Mark Borchardts, and the likelihood of any of them getting anywhere is no better than winning the lottery.
 
Even so, although overly long at 107 minutes, "American Movie" is an incisive, largely absorbing work and a far more mature effort than Smith's "American Job," which sent the message, intentionally or otherwise, that menial jobs are beneath young white males.
 
Never condescending to Borchardt, a tall, lean 30-year-old with a goatee, long hair and outsize glasses, Smith assumes a detached stance at the start and sticks to it. In doing so, he invites us to see Borchardt as an archetypal all-American individualist determined to pursue the American Dream in an era of lowered expectations.
 
For years Borchardt has been working intermittently on "Northwestern," which he describes as about a bunch of guys "drinkin', drinkin', drinkin' "--and which sounds more than a little autobiographical. Early on in "American Movie," Borchardt is forced to abandon the project once again, for the usual reason, a lack of funds. Instead, he resumes work on a supernatural horror thriller, "Coven," shooting in 16 millimeter. Even if he succeeds in completing it, it will have taken him three years to do so. That Borchardt's hero is "Night of the Living Dead's" George Romero is evident in glimpses we get of "Coven." ("Coven" screens tonight and next Friday night at the Nuart at 12:15 a.m., accompanied by 1981's "The Howling.")
 
To his credit, Borchardt, who began making movies at 14, is a resourceful, knowledgeable craftsman; he knows what he wants and how to get it. He's strong-willed, hard-working and focused. He's chronically deep in debt and in a precarious position in a looming custody struggle with his ex-girlfriend over their children. He supports himself delivering papers and working as a cemetery maintenance man. He's a motor-mouth who can be pretty wearying but has an open, affable quality that makes you hope he somehow miraculously beats the odds and enjoys some measure of success.
 
His Swedish-born mother is supportive, and her estranged husband, Mark's father, wishes his son well but is understandably dubious. Even more so is one of Mark's brothers, who says he thinks Mark would be better off working in a factory and wonders who would want to see "Coven" anyway.
 
At one point Mark pauses to consider that here he is, 30 years old, and having to clean up a filthy restroom at the cemetery. The question he needs to ask himself is how he would feel about still doing it at 40.

 
Mr. Cowlin here. You know what? I just erased my initial question. It was about the two above articles. But you know what? I don't care. I love this movie so much, I just don't want to disect it right now. So forget it. Here's the question I really want to hear you answer: What's your favorite part and why?