American Movie [1999]

Though it's scrupulously distanced and implicitly sympathetic to its subject, this documentary cannot but feel like a freakshow. To anyone [like me] who has actually watched a sampling of the direct-sales, made-for-video-release-via-fanzines horror movies like the one its hero is working on, it explains that vague where-the-hell-does-this-stuff-come-from feel one gets watching an EI release.

The subject of Chris Smith's film is Mark Borchardt, a Wisconsin native who started out as a kid shooting 8mm horror films with his friends, clearly inspired by Fangoria the way earlier buffs were by Famous Monsters, and has been failing for some years to get together his magnum opus, a black and white autobiographical slice of life named Northwestern. During the year Smith follows Borchardt and his extended family of friends and relations, Northwestern stalls in pre-production and Borchardt falls back on the project of finishing his short horror movie Coven [he is sniffy with a cast member who complains about his persistent mispronouncing of the title, saying it sounds silly rhymed with oven]. Involved in all this is an 82-year-old uncle whom Mark badgers for money but whom he also takes care of [helping him have a bath on Thanksgiving after he has taken too much peppermint schnapps], his new girlfriend Joan who is all too willing to tag along with his project, his longtime friends Mike Schank, a musician recovering from a drink and drugs problem but unable to kick the scratch cards, and Ken Keen, a likable-seeming 'bad influence' who has to be hauled out of jail for one scene, not to mention Mark's three or four preteen children. Mark's rather more centered brothers aren't sure about his commitment to making movies, which he finances by menial jobs delivering newspapers or cleaning toilets at a cemetery, and even deem him better-suited to factory work or becoming a serial killer; and his parents are split, mother loving but wary after an implied decade of disappointment and father firmly set against the project, ostensibly because of the bad language in the scripts.

Mark is clearly a manic depressive, getting worked up over tiny problems and torn between getting anything finished and protracting the process of its making. Coven has a successful premiere, and the snippets we see are surprisingly strong, belying the Ed Woodian feel of its ramshackle production; just as Mike Schank's guitar score is rather better than his nervously self-appalled demeanour suggests. Typical but unremarked is Mark's clear ruthless streak: he doesn't use his best friend to score his own movie, but the makers of the documentary give the guy a break. Like all fly-on-the-wall docs, there are questions of ethics and morality which can't be resolved and we certainly do wind up laughing at these struggling American dreamers rather than with them, but there is something important in Mark's drive to do something with his life, even if it is also kind of creeped-out.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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