Ryan for Congress

Director: Jake Shaw
Writer: James Smith
Producer: Jake Shaw
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: World premiere, Nottingham, 30th April 2005

Documentaries are hot right now. The week that Ryan for Congress received its first public screening also saw the UK terrestrial premiere of Super Size Me, one week after the UK terrestrial premiere of Spellbound. In the wake of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911, actuality footage on the big screen is more popular than it has ever been since people stopped filming workers leaving factory gates and trains arriving at stations.

This first feature from Jake Shaw, who has been responsible for the featurettes on the DVD releases of several cult films, is an open, honest and wryly amusing look at an election in Ohio in 2002. The incumbent congressman, James Traficant (Democrat) had been found guilty of massive corruption and sentenced to jail, where he was still constitutionally able to contest his old seat as an independent. The Democrats chose as their replacement 29-year-old Tim Ryan, a thoroughly likeable chap but very young and relatively inexperienced. The Republicans put up a frankly scary-looking woman from out of town named Anne Benjamin.

Shaw and his camera followed Ryan and his band of helpers - many of them as fresh to big-stakes politics as the candidate himself, a few of them grizzled old veterans - while also keeping an eye on the Republican camp. Vox pops with supporters of all three candidates pepper the film along with interviews that cover subjects such as the importance of religion in US politics and the introduction in some polling stations of electronic voting systems.

Irrespective of one’s politics, it is impossible not to like Ryan, who comes across as genuinely... well, genuine, and refuses to indulge in negative campaigning, even while the Republicans are urging people to avoid him because as a student he once tried to get in somewhere using his older brother’s ID. It is also very difficult not to dislike the hatchet-faced Benjamin. Ryan’s supporters - and indeed Ryan himself - spend a large part of their campaigning simply standing on street corners (in the cold and the rain - Ohio is not a state renowned for its balmy climate) holding large ‘Ryan for Congress’ signs and waving at passing vehicles. It’s an utterly extraordinary thing to see and, like much of the movie, benefits from being viewed through British eyes. One simply could never imagine any UK politician doing such a thing.

Like many of the current crop of documentary movies, there is a lot of humour here; partly the easy jocularity of the Ryan camp but mostly the battery of eccentrics who pop up in front of Shaw’s camera to offer their honest opinions. And frankly, from a British perspective, the American electoral system just seems bewilderingly amusing. We are given just a glimpse at the 15 pages of candidates and laws that people are expected to vote on, mostly using bizarrely complex hole-punching devices, sometimes using bizarrely complex electronic devices. It would have been nice to see that aspect of the whole process in a bit more detail, contrasting it with the ‘one cross in one box, that’s yer lot’ system in the UK, and possibly speculating about whether it might contribute to the amazingly low turnouts that even well-supported US elections manage.

Though it’s not perfect, Shaw’s documentary (two and a half years in the making, edited down from 40 hours of raw footage) is a snappy, informative picture - as well-paced as it is well-constructed. Obviously we are rooting for Ryan but the film never feels like propaganda - and again that is the benefit of viewing the whole process from across a large ocean. We learn a little about American politics at grass roots level, a little about Northern Ohio (the sort of place that people come from but nobody goes to) and a whole lot about ‘real’ America, a place never shown in any Hollywood movie and rarely mentioned in international news.

Being picky, it’s a little odd that, after explaining about Traficant and his unique situation in the first five minutes, he and his supporters then disappear for more than half an hour, making the contest seem like a two-horse race. Traficant is used as a hook but barely features in the film itself and even a couple of enthusiastic vox pops from his supporters offer no insight into the man, beyond the evident fact that he is a convicted crook. Nor is there any comment on how rare a three-horse race such as this must presumably be in a country so rigidly fixed into a two-party system. It also seems odd that Ryan himself is first introduced to us in a Republican TV commercial listing his heinous teenage ‘fake ID’ occurrence. At that point we don’t know anything about Ryan and it’s not clear what message (or meta-message) we should be deriving from this commercial.

If this is pedantry it’s because I can’t otherwise fault the movie. Shaw proves himself an able interviewer, an observant fly-on-the-wall cameraman and an enthusiastic, diligent narrator, as well as a hugely talented documentarian who really needs to break out of corporate videos and ‘behind-the-scenes’ DVD supplements.

Which brings me to the most curious aspect of Ryan for Congress (apart from uncertainty over the title which may in fact be Tim Ryan for Congress) and that’s the running time. Sixty minutes is okay for BBC or PBS broadcast but too long for a one-hour slot on any commercial channel and too short for theatrical distribution - which in today’s cinematic climate is a definite possibility for a film like this. If Shaw and his team can salvage another 15-20 minutes of usable material out of all that raw footage - or even shoot some new background material about the history or geography of their subject - then Ryan for Congress becomes a film that should knock ‘em dead at festivals and stands a chance of being picked up by a distributor. This is not to suggest that the film should be padded; it is very tightly edited and all the better for that. But the construction is so tight, the editing so snappy, that another quarter-hour could be fitted in somewhere without seriously harming the pace or flow of the story at all.

MJS rating: A
Review originally published 1st May 2005

Wamego: Ultimatum

Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Steve Balderson, Matt Riddlehoover, Joseph Suglia
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.dikenga.com

So let’s put this in context. Steve Balderson has so far made eight feature films. One was a dance documentary, one was effectively an avant-garde art installation, three were narrative features and three were behind-the-scenes documentaries about his second and third narrative features.

It’s an unusual and oddly self-reflexive filmography which in another film-maker might suggest desperation or confusion or even a massive ego. But for Steve a filmography like this is entirely appropriate. Steve is a unique film-maker, so far outside ‘the system’ that one cannot help but feel maybe it’s the system that is outside him. Perhaps Steve is the only one marching in step. A unique film-maker should have a unique filmography and should (of course) make unique films. Of which this is one. Another one.

But this is also the third in a series of films, following on from Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere, which chronicled the production of Steve’s masterpiece Firecracker, and Wamego Strikes Back which documented the distribution of Firecracker. Is Wamego: Ultimatum the final part of a trilogy or simply one more in a potentially endless series of reality-based films?

In one sense this is a return, after Part II, to the more straightforward Making Of format. Except that Wamego: Ultimatum is much, much more than a Making Of. Every two-dollar indie flick has a one-dollar-fifty Making Of nowadays. They’re not even featurettes any more; it has become standard for the Making Of to be as long as (or longer than) the film it’s actually about. Of course, very few film-makers would have the balls to market their Making Ofs separately; Steve does so because the Wamego films (named after his tiny Kansas home town) are not simply adjuncts to his narrative films, they are movies in their own right.

To get down to brass tacks, Ultimatum documents the development, casting, production and release of Watch Out, Steve Balderson’s film version of Joseph Suglia’s almost unfilmable novel of extreme sexual self-obsession. Steve shot this in Wamego in April 2008, taking the finished film on a roadshow tour before the year was out, a distribution technique which had been previously used for Firecracker.

Peppered among the actual documentary footage and talking heads (including Balderson and Suglia who never met until after the film was complete) are occasional, randomly numbered ‘film-making tip’ captions which for all their apparent facetiousness (“Get your cast and crew a discount at the local liquor store”) are actually well worth noting and paying heed to. What is largely absent from the film, curiously enough, is actual footage of Watch Out being shot or rehearsed. Probably because that’s the least interesting part of how Steve makes movies.

Instead we meet the cast as they arrive, one by one, for their allotted stay in Wamego. There’s none of the usual asinine “Oh, I love this film, I’m so excited, everyone here is wonderful, the director is a genius” bullshit that normally characterises this type of thing (actually ‘asinine bullshit’ is a mixed metaphor, isn’t it?). Which is not to say that cast and crew aren’t complementary about young Mr B and each other.

In fact, they’re all very friendly. “There sure is a lot of faggotry going on in here!” is one of the more memorable lines, said deliberately loudly near an open window in the hope of shocking the God-fearing Kansan neighbours. You do start to wonder, after a while, whether there were any heterosexuals working on this movie apart from father/producer Clark Balderson. But flamboyancy is held in check, smut is muted (at least within the documentary) and what emerges is certainly not a ‘gay film’. Steve has never made ‘gay films’ (whatever those are), he makes films about relationships which go far beyond the the normal sexual platitudes of modern cinema. Which is why the frenetic autoeroticism of Suglia’s novel so perfectly suited Balderson’s style.

One gets the impression that making Watch Out was a very happy experience for Steve. After the frustrations of the way his debut, Pep Squad, was treated by distributors (in the UK it was retitled and marketed as a vampire sequel!) and the massively complex organisation behind Firecracker (plus the frustration of trying to find an honest distributor for that, as documented in Wamego II), here we have the director demonstrating, with disarming honesty, that he was able to keep track of the whole production using nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet. Steve has found his niche, his home - it is his home. It’s Wamego.

So he works his cast and small crew hard - seven days a week - but he looks after them too: good food, plenty to drink in the evenings and a trip to the Oz Museum. And boy, does he come across as tolerant. There’s the script supervisor who deletes some continuity photographs to make room in his digital camera for new ones (never had that trouble with Polaroids). There’s the chef who offers to do catering for a week but leaves without explanation after two days (perhaps he was upset at the amount of faggotry going on). Where many directors would have been tearing their hair out and/or tearing people off a strip, Steve takes it all calmly in his stride. He is clearly a great boss.

So where is all this going? What makes the Wamego films different to the run-of-the mill Making Ofs that come with every DVD? I think it’s this: these films don’t document, they explain. Which makes them, I suppose, not so much documentaries as explainaries. Your standard Making Of is all about ‘how’: how we made the film, how we did the effects. The Wamego movies are only tangentially about ‘how’; they’re really about ‘why’. Why Steve makes the films he does, why they turn out so good, why you don’t need Hollywood if you’ve got friends, colleagues, determination, originality and a bucketful of talent.

There is no doubt in my mind that every independent film-maker should watch all three of the Wamego films. Every film-making class should show these movies to its students. Not because they show you how to make films (though there are some damn useful hints and tips in there) but because they show you why you should make films.

There is no need for every aspiring film-maker to rush back to their home town, rope in their dad as a producer and start looking for cult novels to adapt. That’s not the message of Wamego Has Risen from the Grave. The point is that Steve Balderson makes movies his way, how he wants. And if you aspire to film-making, if you aspire to any creative endeavour - well that’s what you should be doing.

As a final point of record, lycanthrope completists should note that in one sequence an actor sings a ukulele-accompanied song about a werewolf.

MJS rating: A-

Wamego Strikes Back

Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Steve Balderson, Clark Balderson, Eric Sherman
Country: USA
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.dikenga.com

Wamego Strikes Back starts with the Star Wars theme music (not the original version, obviously) and a text crawl that spoofs the opening of each of the Star Wars films. It’s a little affectation which we can allow Steve Balderson before he plunges headlong into the sequel to his earlier Making Of feature on Firecracker, his second feature film proper.

And just think for a moment how odd this is: a sequel to a documentary. Who has ever heard of a documentary having a sequel? Who has ever heard of a movie having two feature length documentaries made about it, each of which is released on a separate DVD? But then, young Mr Balderson is not someone who does things ‘the normal way’. Tucked away in a corner of Kansas, he is about as independent as independent film-makers get.

Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere told the story of how Firecracker was conceived, cast and produced. Wamego Strikes Back picks up the story with the film’s world premiere at Raindance in London and tells of how it was distributed - or not, as the case may be. Making movies, as anyone who dips a toe into this ridiculous industry rapidly discovers, is only half the battle. Once you’ve made a film, you’ve got to find a way for people to see it. Sure, you can send it to film festivals, but only a very small percentage of the movie-going population ever attend a film festival and to some extent every festival acts primarily as a shop window for (a) distributors and (b) other film festivals.

So for eighty minutes we watch Steve and his producer/father Clark struggle with distributors, seeing the film that they slaved over turned down again and again for increasingly ridiculous reasons which all basically translate as: “Though we like to think we’re edgy and independent, in actual fact we are as conservative as the Townswomen’s Guild’s cake-and-jam stall at a village fete and we dare not touch anything that doesn’t look like everything else that we and our sheeplike competitors are buying at the moment.”

It’s not like Firecracker doesn’t come with a seal of approval. Roger Ebert no less praised it to the skies in one of the best-written film reviews I’ve ever read. It picked up a truckload of nominations and awards at festivals around the world. But no, no-one wanted to distribute it. And you know, you can make your own movie in Kansas but if you want people to see it, you’ve got to work with the Hollywood system. They control the horizontal and the vertical. There is no alternative.

Bollocks to that said Steve (or would have done, had he been making films in Market Drasen instead of Wamego). Inspired by the travelling carnival in the movie, he took a 35mm print of Firecracker out on a roadshow tour of the USA, proving that there is a way to let people see your work. Suddenly, distributors came sniffing but as we see in a series of scenes featuring an increasingly exasperated Clark, Hollywood is just naturally structured to screw the little man. So huge corporations for whom anything under a million dollars is small change are months late in making payments of fifty or sixty thousand dollars.

While Clark struggles with the financial chicanery surrounding Firecracker, Steve tries to drum up investment for his putative third feature, Wilbert Brummett, a character ensemble piece loosely based on his own family. By the end of this movie, Wilbert Brummett is consigned to a shelf as Steve realises he can’t just make one film every six or seven years. Instead, he sits at his desk and makes his offbeat documentary/installation Phone Sex for pretty much nothing at all (as he points out, he didn’t even have to pay for long distance phone calls because people were calling him).

On this basis he decides that he can go completely outside ‘the system’, making the films that he wants, when and where he wants, rather than slaving for years to make one specific film. That doesn’t in any way take away from the extraordinary achievement that is Firecracker (or indeed Pep Squad) but Steve wants to move on and explore new avenues - and well he should.

Although similar in presentation to the first film, Wamego Strikes Back suffers slightly from having a less visually interesting topic. Making a film involves building things and painting things and cameras and actors and sets and extras and props and, you know, stuff that’s interesting to watch and look at. Distributing a movie involves endless meetings (where a video camera can’t go) and phone conversations or even e-mails. There is a head-bangingly bizarre moment when Clark reads out an e-mail exchange wherein both the sales rep trying to sell Firecracker and the person he thinks might buy it consistently refer to the film as Fireworks.

You might think: how can someone sell a product that they don’t even know what it’s called? But frankly, the title is the last thing that any distributor worries about. We saw that with Pep Squad which was released in the UK as I’ve Been Watching You 2, an ersatz ‘sequel’ to high school vampire thriller I’ve Been Watching You which was itself a retitling of David DeCoteau’s The Brotherhood!

Among the talking heads and other footage, Wamego Strikes Back repeatedly cuts to a fellow named Eric Sherman who, according to his website, is an ‘author and film industry consultant’ (and whose father Vincent directed The Return of Dr Rx!). I can see why Steve gets on with Sherman because he comes across as a no-bullshit guy and there aren’t many of them in Hollywood.

According to Sherman there are 500 people in the American film industry calling themselves sales reps or producer’s reps; in other words, their role is to connect film-makers with distributors. Sherman says he has met and spoken with every single one and that there are only fifteen who won’t charge an upfront fee. Like any reputable agent, those fifteen make their money by taking a percentage of the deals that they broker. The other 485 have to be paid in advance with absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that they will achieve anything - or even try to do anything. That’s like paying a builder a wad of cash just to come to your house and give you a quote on a new kitchen. It’s bizarre.

How can the market survive like that? Why doesn’t everyone use the fifteen honorable reps? I would imagine that, because of how they work, they can pick and choose the very best films to represent. After all, they can only have so many titles on their books at any one time. So every other film, even if it’s an award-winner, has to go through one of the 485 shysters. Okay, so why doesn’t any one of those shysters think: “If I took a percentage instead of charging an upfront fee, I too could have my pick of the best films”?

Because they don’t need to, that’s why. People bring them films and pay them money, people who have worked their guts out on a movie and are desperate to get it distributed, so there is no need for those 485 reps to adjust their business model. The whole thing is extraordinary.

There are lots of Making Of documentaries but Wamego Strikes Back could very well be the world’s first Distributing Of documentary. It’s a story rarely told and a salutary lesson for all would-be film-makers. It features loud aunts, Kansans getting lost in London and cheekily appropriated YouTube clips of Lily Tomlin screaming obscenities on the set of I Heart Huckabees. Throughout it all is an overwhelming sense of ruthless honesty. Because Steve is ploughing his own furrow, determined not to battle through this nonsense again, he has no qualms about naming names; not individuals but the companies he is dealing with, the ones who pay his father sixty thousand dollars four months late.

There is nothing coy here, nothing diplomatic. Steve and Clark are dealing with people and companies who are either idiots or bastards or both and the men from Kansas call it like they see it. In that sense, this is an even more interesting, important and essential film than its predecessor.

So why is it curiously unsatisfying? What is it about Wamego Strikes Back that is just slightly off, that prevents it from coalescing into a robust and substantial whole?

About five minutes from the end of this film, a thought struck me, one of those moments of critical clarity that just comes along occasionally. I realised that Wamego Strikes Back doesn’t just ape the title and opening of The Empire Strikes Back, this film actually is The Empire Strikes Back. I don’t mean it has Taun-Tauns and Wompas and AT-ATs and the like. I mean that the big problem with this movie is exactly the same big problem that Empire has and since Empire is a magnificent cinematic achievement, its triumphs rendering its big problem irrelevant, we can likewise simply and safely ignore that problem when it arises in the North East corner of Kansas.

Let me explain. Most Star Wars fans will tell you that The Empire Strikes Back is the best film in the series, although I personally prefer the first one. True, Empire has terrific action sequences, wonderful special effects, breathtaking art direction, a thrilling, entertaining and literate script and more characterisation than the other two (in fact, five) Star Wars films put together. But it does not have a conventional cinematic structure.

Empire’s big problem is that, although it has three acts - a beginning, a middle and an end - they are not in the right order. Think about it: the movie starts with the battle for Hoth, pitching us right into a massive, climactic battle scene, full of action and heroics. That should be at the end of the film. The middle bit is people doing stuff - character and plot development - which is all well and good. And then the film ends when our various main characters split up to undertake their individual quests in the pursuit of a common goal. That should be at the start.

The Empire Strikes Back is a wonderful film but it is back-to-front, it’s arse-about-face, the hero’s journey is travelled in reverse gear. Whereas the original Star Wars has its beginning, middle and end in the correct order and so is - for me - more satisfying.

And so it is with the Wamego duology.

Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere tells a story from start to finish. It has a conventional beginning, middle and end in its reasonably linear documentation of development, pre-production and production. It starts with ambition and culminates in achievement. It goes forwards. But Wamego Strikes Back, which I at first found almost random and disjointed, actually plays in reverse. It opens with a triumphant world premiere, which one would expect to find at the climax of a film-making narrative. Then there’s a bunch of people doing stuff (or in the case of producer’s reps, getting paid for not doing stuff) and the film finishes with our hero Steve deciding on what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, which in a classical narrative would be our first act.

Just like its sci-fi namesake, Wamego Strikes Back has a beginning, a middle and an end - but not necessarily in the right order.

But you know what? That didn’t matter with Empire and it doesn’t matter here. I’m going to knock a grade off this film for its structural problems and then stick it right back on again because that’s not the point. The point is to watch, in sometimes painful detail, quite how hellish life can be for an independent film-maker.

However, as Clark points out, in a few years digital downloading will be the norm and film-makers will be able to distribute their wares in the same way that musicians can now. And then Hollywood had better watch out because their tentative hold on Steve Balderson and his kind will be lost forever.

(Oh, and one more thing. Does Steve Balderson only have one shirt? He wears the same blue check shirt in almost every scene throughout the combined three-hour running time of these two films, which together document nine years of his life. For God’s sake, buy the man’s DVDs so he can afford some new clothes.)

MJS rating: A-

[And two years later, Steve was back with... Wamego: Ultimatum - MJS]

Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere

Producers: Steve Balderson
Cast: Steve Balderson, Clark Balderson, Karen Black
Country: USA
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: US DVD
Website: www.dikenga.com
Now free on Vimeo - see end of review

The Making Of documentary is a relatively recent invention. It started out as the occasional TV special on a big summer blockbuster and gradually became fused with the electronic press kit or EPK. Although there were Making Ofs during the VHS era it was really the advent of DVD in the late 1990s that brought this specific type of film to the fore. It rapidly became the norm to make a 20-30 minute ‘featurette’ for any movie in production, mixing behind-the-scenes footage with cast and crew interviews.

The first feature-length Making Of which was capable of distribution on its own was probably Burden of Dreams in 1982, Les Blank’s documentary on Werner Herzog’s epic drama Fitzcarraldo. But that was a one-off and it was only with The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys fifteen years later that the in-depth Making Of documentary became established as a cinematic subgenre in its own right.

Nowadays it’s rare indeed to find a film that doesn’t have a Making Of and in the field of independent cinema it is almost a given that some aspiring or student film-maker will be allowed to hang around the set with a camcorder and assemble something for the DVD. The problem is: the more of these things one watches, the more one realises that all films are basically made the same way. It takes something really special like Lost in La Mancha (which, uniquely, is the Making Of a film that was never made) to stand out from the crowd. For the most part, every Making Of is pretty much like every other Making Of and only the details differ.

Imagine if you watched a documentary film about someone building a house. All very interesting and you could learn a lot about the construction industry. Now watch another documentary about someone else building a different house. And another and another. After a while the only thing that will distinguish one film from another is the colour of the front door. And so it is with Making Of documentaries.

All of which is interesting but to some extent irrelevant because Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere is not a typical Making Of.

Wamego is the name of the town where the Balderson family live. It is in the North East corner of Kansas which is an almost entirely rectangular state. It’s called a ‘city’ but has a population of just over 4,000 which makes it about two thirds the size of the the village of East Leake where I went to school. I find it fascinating that the USA, a huge country where everything seems to be several times larger than it is in the rest of the world, nevertheless has cities that are smaller than English villages. Anyway...

Wamego is real small-town America, a place where everyone knows everyone else - in fact, as producer Clark Balderson points out, most people are related to everyone else in some way. According to online man-in-a-pub Wikipedia, the town’s two main claims to fame, apart from the Baldersons, are a museum devoted to The Wizard of Oz and (allegedly, at one time) the largest LSD factory in the United States. It is not the sort of place where you would expect a feature film to be made - and that is the point of this documentary.

There was a six-year gap between Steve Balderson’s first feature, the sublime black comedy Pep Squad, and his second, the achingly beautiful murder mystery Firecracker. Wamego goes some way to explaining why, despite widespread critical acclaim and a bunch of awards, a follow-up to Pep Squad was so long in coming.

Strictly speaking, this is not a film about making a movie, it’s a film about getting a movie made. Clark Balderson, Steve’s father and producer, sums it up in one concise quote: “The average guy, sitting in a movie theatre, watching a movie, cannot begin to comprehend the amount of detail, the degree of complexity, that is present in a motion picture.”

Unlike a standard Making Of, Wamego does not show us how particular shots were filmed and it doesn’t interview all the cast and crew. There are some talking heads but the level of luvviness usually seen in these things - “Oh, he was just wonderful to work with. He’s a delight. We just had so much fun together...”: give me a flipping break - is much lower than normal. There are a few comments about how wonderful Karen Black is but also some carefully veiled intimation that she is also, shall we say, somewhat demanding.

What Steve, Clark and their cast and crew demonstrate and recount is the amount of work - administrative, technical and sheer manual labour - required to produce a piece of quality cinema like Firecracker. But at the same time, they are at pains to point out that by operating outside the Hollywood system they were able to make the decisions they wanted rather than kowtowing to received wisdom about how things must be done. This made their lives easier and ultimately made Firecracker possible.

Not that Steve Balderson is some sort of dangerous maverick. He has to negotiate with stars’ agents, he has to pay wages commensurate with SAG agreements, he has to abide by the rules.

The written rules.

Film-making as an industry is hidebound by unwritten rules so hooray for Balderson and son who don’t give a tinker’s cuss about ‘how it should be done’. What they care about is efficiency, cost effectiveness, practicality and artistic vision. If any one thing comes through when watching the hundred minutes or so of Wamego it’s that at no point was Steve ever prepared to compromise his vision of what Firecracker should be like. And if that meant turning down big stars who actually wanted to do the film (Debbie Harry was very nearly Sheriff Ed, a role eventually played by Susan Traylor) then so be it.

Wamego is more than a document, more than a documentary, it’s a masterclass in how to pursue your dreams. There are two lessons here: (1) You don’t have to do things the way everybody else does if you can find a way that’s better for you, and (2) you had better be prepared to work bloody hard. I was amazed to find, for example, that Steve, Clark and a few friends actually built all the ‘gypsy wagons’ seen in the carnival scenes from scratch. Just building those wagons must have taken more time, effort and money than some people put into a whole movie. At the same time, scenes of cast and crew painting colourful side-show banners have a tremendous sense of esprit de corps that says, ‘Hey kids, let’s do the show right here!’

No director is credited on Wamego although the IMDB lists Steve, Joe Martin and Ed Leboeuf. The credits simply say that the film was compiled by Imagemakers, which is a graphic design and advertising agency that Steve runs when he’s not shooting movies.

Wamego is a fascinating, intriguing, uplifting movie packed with conflict resolved, obstacles overcome and ambitions achieved, just like any good, well-told story. And just like any great movie, three years later Wamego spawned a sequel.

MJS Rating: A-


WAMEGO: Making Movies Anywhere from Steve Balderson on Vimeo.

Take Me to Your Leader

Director: Keith Wright
Writer: Keith Wright
Producer: Keith Wright
Cast: Roger Bingham, Keith Wright’s dad, Keith Wright’s mum
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.frissonfilm.co.uk
Watch now - Distrify link at end of review

You know that film, Ed Wood? The Edward D Wood Jr biopic directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp? Imagine if that was set not in 1950s Hollywood but in present day Yorkshire. With a script by Alan Bennett.

Take Me to Your Leader belongs, like Mark Withers’ Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice, in the subgenre of ‘recursive mockumentaries’: fictional, narrative films which pretend to be non-fictional documentaries about the making of an entirely imaginary fictional, narrative film. Hardcore was about the making of a porno flick, in Take Me to Your Leader the genre in question is science fiction.

The film follows the efforts of Corbin West (Roger Bingham, who was in episodes of The League of Gentlemen and The Last Train), a predominantly cheerful 55-year-old underachiever who decides to make a 1950s-style alien invasion epic on a shoe-string, starring himself as the alien leader Zortan. He ropes in a motley crew including American cinematographer Joe Palentino (Tristian Cooper with a completely convincing LA accent), stunt arranger Chet Harris (director Keith Wright’s father, who is also called Keith and is credited here as Keith S Wright) who claims to have worked on a Bond film, costume designer Margaret Fipps (Margaret Wright, mother of Keith and wife of Keith S) and elderly production designer Ray Pickles (retired roofing contractor Ray Ledger). The cast of this sci-fi movie includes aggressively self-confident leading man Simon Delgado (Grant Bridges) playing a character called ‘Wildboy’ and leading lady Jennifer Almon (Penelope Ellis).

Rounding out the family connection, Keith’s gran Margaret Collier plays Corbin’s estranged mother Betty who, in a continuation of the Ed Wood angle, wanted a girl so christened him Shirley and dressed him in skirts. Keith S Wright (as ‘Keith Wright Snr’) and Margaret Collier previously appeared in Keith Wright’s short film Long in the Tooth (available on the Frisson Film website) as a vampire scarecrow and his mum.

Over the course of 71 minutes we see these intrepid film-makers, armed with a surfeit of self-confidence but no discernible talent, attempt to make an SF feature called... Take Me to Your Leader. There is a mixture of fly-on-the-wall observation and to-camera interviews although the interviewer himself is only rarely heard. Other participants appear occasionally, notably a young special effects enthusiast with a slightly overdeveloped enthusiasm for explosives (whose appearances are, to be honest, too few and too brief to really register) and two double glazing salesmen persuaded to provide financial backing. Bubbling under this story is a subplot about the mother-son estrangement.

It’s slightly misleading to call this a mockumentary because it doesn’t mock anything. The characters are all massively sympathetic and portrayed with enormous affection, even the arrogant leading man and the loudmouthed Yank DP. There is a gentleness to Take Me to Your Leader which one doesn’t see in the likes of This is Spinal Tap (which Wright acknowledges as an inspiration) and this has the curious effect of making the film undeniably enjoyable without ever being laugh-out-loud funny. This is wry Northern character comedy; Keith Wright and co. may not thank me for saying this but it sometimes feels more Lancashire than Yorkshire in its humour - although I appreciate that to soft, shandy-drinking Southerners there may be no discernible difference.

What suffuses the entire film is pathos. The pathos of Corbin West’s confidence that he can make a film (not a great film, just a little one); the pathos of those who trust and follow him; and the pathos of his mother who, interviewed separately, has finally come to accept that her child is male not female and wishes to see him again.

If there is a fault it’s that the character conflict, which is indispensable to good films but especially to one like this, when it comes, comes too suddenly. Everyone is having a jolly time, buoyed up by West’s positive attitude, then about halfway through people start arguing and in some instances fighting. And this conflict comes solely from characters rather than from the situation of a semi-amateur film shoot; one gets the impression that the same characters, if thrown together in any situation, would have the same disputes.

Contrary to expectations (and the tropes of this particular subgenre) the film-making process itself does not throw external problems into the mix as one might expect. The fact that the cast can’t act, the script is clichéed and facile and the designs are ridiculous - none of this creates problems for West. And to be fair it’s not really a problem for the viewer either except insofar as it’s not what one expects when popping the disc into the player.

What can be said - indeed, what should be emphasised - is that despite many of the real cast being amateurs (including several who are not directly related to Keith Wright) the level of performance here is wonderful. Entirely naturalistic, there’s not a bad performance on screen, not even a bad moment in an otherwise good performance. These characters are so real that the line between Keith Wright’s cut-price feature film and Corbin West’s even more meagrely budgeted effort becomes blurred. We utterly, utterly believe that these are real people. There are a couple of moments in the accompanying 15-minute Making Of when it is very difficult to tell whether we are watching Roger Bingham talking about a spoof documentary called Take Me to Your Leader or an out-take of Corbin West talking about a sci-fi picture called Take Me to Your Leader.

Because, boy are there out-takes (albeit none on the actual disc). Keith Wright shot a massive eighty hours of footage, meaning there’s about 78 hours and fifty minutes sat on a hard drive somewhere (including some 16mm and super-8 clips of the ‘actual film’). The whole of Take Me to Your Leader was improvised, with the actors (both pro and am) developing their characters over the course of production. There was no script, just a basic list of scenes with starting points, key elements and approximate, hoped-for finishing points. Which, let’s face it, is also how they did Spinal Tap.

But the important thing about a film is not how it was made (despite the aforementioned Making Of and a Wright/Bingham commentary). To the viewer, it shouldn’t make any difference whether the actors are pros or the director’s parents, whether the film was improvised then distilled from nearly a week of raw footage or whether every word was carefully scripted beforehand. It’s what’s on screen that counts and, while we can all admire Keith Wright’s determination (especially a fortnight of self-imposed isolation in a caravan park to do the bulk of the edit), we must judge the film on the film alone.

In which respect I think I can declare Take Me To Your Leader a thorough success. It’s a wonderful slice of very British humour, about underdogs who fail to triumph (in America, everything would end happily - even Ed Wood culminated in a fictitious successful premiere of Plan 9 from Outer Space). There is redemption and development here but above all there are characters: rounded, fully believable characters with hopes and dreams and lives beyond the 71 minutes that we see.

Making a film about film-making is considerably trickier than it sounds because one must balance what it’s really like against what people think it’s like. Most film sets are incredibly dull places but Corbin West’s location work looks like great fun. During the ‘zombie walk’ scene it’s entirely unclear whether the people being zombies think they’re making a real film for Corbin West or a fake film for Keith Wright. That surely is the sign of a good spoof documentary (I’m not going to call it a mockumentary again, I think it’s misleading).

Take Me to Your Leader is a warm, gentle, slice-of-life comedy that just happens to be about a man trying to make a science fiction film. Maybe it’s a little too short - and I don’t say that very often! - with room for another ten minutes or so in the middle to make the transition from calm to conflict less sudden. But that’s not a major problem by any means. Kudos to one-man-band Keith Wright (who did everything except the music, basically) for doing something different and making it work, despite the obvious odds stacked against him. And fictional kudos to Corbin West for exactly the same thing!

(The disc also includes Wright's award-winning short Where's Bingo Betty?)

MJS rating: A-

 

Who’s Changing

Director: Cameron K McEwan
Producer: Elisar Cabrera
Cast: Lots of folks
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Website: www.whoschanging.co.uk
Watch now - see end of review for Distrify link

I wouldn’t normally watch a feature-length documentary about Doctor Who fans but this one was produced by my old mate Elisar Cabrera so I gave it a punt. Elisar, those of you with long memories may recall, was there right at the start of the British Horror Revival (or arguably just before it) directing Demonsoul and Witchcraft X and producing Virtual Terror (under the pseudonym ‘Elisar C Kennedy’). We shan’t hold that evidence against him.

Before commencing the review, it’s probably best if I explain my own thoughts and position vis-à-vis Doctor Who, so you know from whence I am coming in my praise/criticism. I started watching Who at the commencement of the Jon Pertwee era. In fact my earliest memory of anything is seeing Patrick Troughton’s final episode when I must have been about 18 months old. Interestingly, this documentary starts with some folk recalling their first memories of the show, with several saying that it’s their earliest memory of anything and pretty much everyone picking the final episode of a particular Doctor.

I then watched the series continually until the Bonnie Langford era when even I couldn’t stomach it any more, though I did return for Sophie Aldred. What I never did was become an actual Doctor Who Fan. Never joined the fan club, never bought a fanzine, never attended a convention. My slice of fandom was Hitchhiker’s Guide and it was through the Hitchhiker’s fan club that I was introduced to wider SF fandom, including a range of conventions from 1984 onwards. But these were general sci-fi cons, catering for Who, Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica etc etc. And they were small, intimate cons of maybe 100-200 fans, in a hotel, getting very drunk indeed with a couple of guest actors/writers/whatever hanging out in the bar. Later I ran my own cons, edited the HHGG newsletter and rose to the dizzying heights of HHGG fan club president. So I know of fandom, but not specifically of Doctor Who fandom. And in any case, it has very much All Changed Since I Were A Lad.

Cameron K McEwan’s film is a good overview of Who fandom in its current state with some interesting stuff about the past which personally I found more interesting, though that may just be my status as an old fart. Considering that it’s basically 80 minutes of talking heads and people walking around cons, Who’s Changing is strangely compelling and curiously watchable. It’s not self-indulgent and seems aimed more at the ‘lay Whovian’ like me rather than the hardcore fan who actually attends these things (though they will presumably want to watch it as well). It’s certainly a lot, lot better – more sympathetic, more informed, more observant – than a similar thing would be if it was made for TV broadcast.

Unsurprisingly, none of the Doctors themselves are on show here except in still photos (although one interview was cheekily filmed in front of Tom Baker’s autograph queue). However, it does have Leela and Ace from the old series and, from the new one, Madame Vastra, Jenny, Strax, the little girl who played young Amy and the fat blue bloke who was in a couple of episodes. And while show-runners RTD and the Moff are also absent, there are a number of people who have written spin-off books, comics, audio adventures or even actual episodes, including Eric Saward, James Moran, Gary Russell and Jeremy Bentham. Plus lots and lots of fans.

What the documentary addresses, its main theme, is the revival of Who in the 21st century, including the salient point that those who brought it back were active fans of the original series and the way that Who fandom has now massively broadened, both geographically and socially. While the fans are, by their nature, enthusiastic and positive, there’s a refreshing lack of bland “David Tennant is so dishy!” fangirl squealiness. Although one thing I took away from watching this, unremarked in the film itself, is that contemporary fans of the new series seem largely uncritical, whereas ‘old school’ fans recall that part of the joy of fandom was complaining about the rubbish episodes.

I started rewatching Who when it came back in 2005 (I also recall seeing the McGann movie, actually at one of the sci-fi cons I helped to run). I came to the new show with absolutely no expectations; in fact I had made such a good job of avoiding spoilers that I didn’t even know they had abandoned the awful old multi-episode format so was genuinely surprised when ‘Rose’ wrapped up after 45 minutes. In my critical opinion, the new version is vastly better than the old, not just in the obvious effects but in the stories, the writing, the direction and the acting. I have no interest at all, not even a nostalgic one, in rewatching any episodes from the 20th century. As for all that Missing/New Adventures tat they published during the wilderness years, I tried to read one once and it was just dreadful. (A witty writer once observed of the Missing Adventures: “From where exactly are they missing? What’s that you say? From the shelves of discerning readers? That’s a bit unkind.”)

However, the above notwithstanding, the show seriously lost its edge when the Moff took over from RTD. I can say with hand on heart that I absolutely loved virtually all of the Eccleston/Tennant episodes and have been massively disappointed with virtually all of the Matt Smith episodes (through no fault of the actor), to the extent that I probably wouldn’t bother still watching if it wasn’t for TF Simpson. (TF was about 18 months old when we sat him down to watch ‘Rose’.  A year or two later he cornered me with a quizzical expression and asked, in all seriousness, “Daddy, Doctor Who’s not real, is he?” And a year or two after that he developed an increasingly obsessive attitude to the show to the extent that my living room is nowadays a sea of Doctors, companions, Daleks, Cyberman, Sontarans, Silurians, Weeping Angels, sonic screwdrivers and at least three different Tardis playsets. Good grief.)

Anyway, the point of all the above is that modern fans of NuWho seem uncritical of the show and thus miss out on one of the great joys of fandom, which is complaining about the thing you love. They also don’t seem to drink very much, possibly because their cons are in hangar-like convention centres rather than hotels, possibly because they’re not actually old enough, or possibly because they’re just too boring. Alcohol and crushing disappointment – that’s what makes a true sci-fi fan.

A lot of the fans interviewed are in costume, and I have absolutely nothing against costumes at sci-fi cons. Forry Ackerman invented the idea before the war and I’ve probably worn a few in my time, although nothing like the level of handiwork on show nowadays and usually only for the costume contest and/or the Saturday night disco. However, I refuse to use the ghastly American term ‘cosplay’. It’s fancy dress, plain and simple. Fancy dress is great fun and some people put enormous time and effort into creating costumes which are either exact replicas or wildly imaginative, for which they are to be commended. But it is just fancy dress, folks.

There’s even talk of ‘crossplay’ which is fancy dress drag. There’s some toot about how women can dress up as male characters but men can’t dress up as female ones, and that this reflects society and it’s something which empowers women when they drag up but which emasculates men yada yada yada. That was one of the few points when I wanted to give the documentary a good slap because the simple, unstated truth is that a woman in male clothing is hot, while a man in female clothing is funny. It’s not impossible, but very, very difficult, for a bloke in drag to actually look sexy. But then again, it’s also very, very difficult for a woman in drag to get big laughs. Vive la difference, say I. Far too politically correct, these young Who fans.

Which brings us on to the subject of, well, not sex but sexiness. There’s lots of discussion, mostly by women, of how the modern show has sexy doctors. Interestingly, one female fan praises NuWho for adding romance to the show while another complains about it. There’s no doubt that Tennant attracted legions of girls and women to the show, as has Smith and (retrospectively) Eccleston as well. And I have no doubt that female Who fans will similarly swoon over Peter Capaldi (whose casting is mentioned here, marking the film as bang up to date but of course swiftly dating it come October). But let us not forget the wise words of Paul Merton who once pointed out that all you have to do to be considered ‘sexy’ is be on television and have a pulse.

Certainly there’s no denying that the show has large numbers of female fans now who were noticeably absent during the original run. A number of people recall the first ever Who convention in 1977 (from which there are several fascinating photos shown) as being almost entirely male, as were most of the subsequent Who cons. The only women in evidence, apparently, were girlfriends who had been dragged along, a condemnation subsequently downgraded still further by another interviewee who says it was in fact fans’ long-suffering mothers who provided the only oestrogen in the otherwise all-male environment. (This was not endemic to SF fandom in general, incidentally. Multimedia cons of the sort I attended and organised were generally about 60/40 in the M/F split. Most of the big names in Star Trek fandom have tended to be female (Bjo Trumble, to name one obvious example). And frankly if a single bloke couldn’t pull at the almost all-female conventions for shows like Quantum Leap or Beauty and the Beast then he might as well become a monk.)

One of the writers here, can’t recall who, opines at length (albeit eruditely and with some justification) that the 21st century Doctors are ‘sexy’ but not ‘sexual’, strengthening his argument by reminding us that McGann’s Doctor actually was sexual, enjoying a lingering snog with his female associate whereas his successors have largely gone no further than a peck on the cheek. And this brings me to my main point: the elephant in the room, the lacuna, the empty space at the heart of this (nevertheless highly commendable) documentary. And I realise that much of this review has described what this film is not, rather than what it is, for which I apologise. But then, what it is is a succession of well-shot and well-edited talking heads of actors, writers and fans discussing Doctor Who. There – that’s not much of a review is it?

So what is missing? Well, it seems very curious to me that among all this talk of sexy men, of cross-dressing, of old school Doctor Who fandom, there is no mention at all anywhere of sexuality. And that’s actually really rather relevant to the topic under discussion. One of the reasons why those early Who cons in the 1970s and 1980s were so massively male-dominated was that, for some reason, the show – or rather its fandom – attracted a disproportionate number of gay men. I mean, seriously. Sci-fi fandom has always been a very tolerant environment – infinite diversity in infinite combination, as the Trekkies put it – and other fandoms had their share of folk of different sexualities. But it was a standing joke for many years that the loneliest sci-fi fan in the world was a straight man at a Doctor Who convention.

Russell T Davies and Mark Gatiss are two of the most obvious names when thinking of gay Who fans who went on to be involved in the show’s successful  return but there are many others. Now please don’t get me wrong; I am not for one moment suggesting that Who has been recreated by some sort of ‘gay mafia’. But the fact remains that many of the leading figures of Who fandom in the 1980s and 1990s who have worked on the show subsequently have been gay men. And I think this is significant if only because NuWho has made tremendous strides in making homosexuality more acceptable and dispelling prejudice. Remember that scene where Captain Jack said goodbye to Rose and the Doctor? He gave Rose a kiss and, by God, you could hear a significant proportion of the viewing audience simultaneously shouting, as a joke, now kiss the Doctor. And he did!

That was a breakthrough moment in British TV. In a tea-time family show, a flamboyant, openly bi character (played by a flamboyant, openly gay actor) kissing another man. And the reason it was such a breakthrough was because, despite the millions who saw it, no-one made a fuss. Not too many years ago, that would have been front page news on the tabloids. The ‘80s and ‘90s were full of stories about gay characters on TV, not opprobrium but salacious nevertheless. There was that lesbian on Brookside, and for SF fans there was Ivanova in Babylon 5 who was hailed as being some sort of breakthrough gay character when she was actually just a rapacious dyke in a military uniform, feeding straight men’s fantasies.

But now we have Madame Vastra and Jenny, an openly gay married couple – “Good evening. I am a lizard woman from the dawn of time and this is my wife.” - and nothing is made of it. And that’s wonderful. That shows how far we’ve come. And it’s an example for the next generation. I certainly know that when TF becomes aware of variant sexualities, I can hold up Captain Jack and Madame Vastra as examples when I explain things to him.

There are plenty of other gay gags in RTD-era Who (“The Master, eh? Has he still got a beard?” “No. Well, a wife.”) and in terms of fandom there was a memorable comedy sketch on BBC2 in 1999, written by Mark Gatiss, in which Gatiss and David Walliams played Who fans who kidnap Peter Davison, ending with a shot of Davison’s eyes going wide in horror as Gatiss asks, “Would it be okay to… kiss Peter Davison?”

Now I’m not here to write a thesis on representations of homosexuality in Doctor Who, or to speculate on why the asexual Doctor should have held this fascination for homosexual men. And I fully realise that Cameron and Elisar could only fit so much into their documentary. But it just seems to be this massively relevant aspect of Who, NuWho and Who fandom which the film keeps approaching – male/female ratios, sex appeal of leading men, cross-dressing fans – and never quite reaches. (And there is a thesis to be written here. Why would a show largely created by gay men create such an appeal for women: is the Doctor really a sex object or just a gay best friend? And while we’re at it, why has it gone so massively downhill since control passed into the hands of a ‘breeder’?)

But I guess if you know about that side of things, you don’t need to be told it in a documentary, and folk who don’t know probably don’t care and won't spot the gap. So to return to the subject in hand, let’s briefly consider the technical aspects of Who's Changing which are very good. Camera-work and sound recording are excellent; the latter in particular can be a real problem in an open convention environment but there are no problems here. The film looks and sounds thoroughly professional yet has a fan-made aesthetic at the same time, somehow. The editing is smart and snappy too, skirting around the lack of any actual BBC stills or footage (apart from two or three very, very brief clips right at the start). Archive home video of previous events is incorporated into the main film, some of it no doubt supplied by my old mate Kevin Jon Davies whose name can be spotted in the credits. Behind-the-scenes and convention photos of Tennant, RTD and others give them an on-screen presence without troubling copyright lawyers.

The film is available to stream via Distrify for just £3.49 – link below – or if you prefer physical media you can buy the DVD (which includes extended interviews) for a kibblesworth under 13 quid from the website or selected high street geek stores. Full details at www.whoschanging.co.uk The film willenta haven* its theatrical premiere at Sci-Fi London on 3rd May 2014 (*one for the Dr Dan Streetmentioner fans there) and is also scheduled to screen at various festivals and conventions on both sides of the Atlantic. The whole thing was crowdfunded via Indiegogo in 2013.

The world of Doctor Who fandom has, over the years, often been incredibly insular and self-obsessed and it’s good to be able to view the passionate fans through the dispassionate lens of Cameron McEwan and see what that world is like now. Lots of people having fun, clearly, many of them wearing cute outfits. But I can’t say it appeals to me. Too much yacking, too many young people, not enough drinking, not enough complaining.

It were all electromagnetic fields around here when I were a lad…

MJS rating: B+

Phone Sex

Director: Steve Balderson
Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: pretty much everyone in Steve Balderson’s address book
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.dikenga.com

Steve Balderson is American cinema’s best-kept secret. Away from the cheap glitter of Hollywood, in deepest Kansas, Steve has made two simply brilliant movies, Pep Squad and Firecracker, which have been smash hit festival faves. For his third feature, young Mr Balderson has done something, ah, completely different.

The premise is simple, and bear with me even if it sounds like bollocks, because it’s not, it’s really not. Steve e-mailed several dozen friends and acquaintances with a simple question: “What is sexy?” He invited them to leave a message on an answerphone. Then he took all those messages, edited them together and added some visuals.

In other words, what we have here is 95 minutes of (slightly tinny) people discussing sexiness over various still stock photos. It shouldn’t work, should it? It could have so easily been terrible. Or perhaps Steve could have gone through the messages and realised that there was nothing there to work with and the experiment was a failure. In fact, for all we know, he could have tried this five times before with different friends and/or a different question before he got something that works. With an avant-garde project like this, you never know whether it will all come together or whether it will crash and burn.

It did not crash and burn. On the contrary, Phone Sex is a triumph. Here is that rarest of things: an avant-garde film which is both interesting and entertaining.

The responses vary wildly. Some people read out prepared statements or lists, others improvise on the phone. Some list the aspects of a person which can be sexy, some suggest famous people who were sexy, some just cite concepts or ideas that are sexy. For some people, the response is purely personal, for others they’re clearly searching for some greater, broader generalisation - although ultimately everything in the matter is personal of course. Pop singer Josie Cotton kicks off proceedings with a rather rambling attempt to actually define the word ‘sexy’.

Some calls are short, some long, some people ring back later with other ideas. Most, but not all, are quite clean. What come through above all is the sheer variety of responses; the only three things that get frequent citations are (a) confidence, (b) “my voice” and (c) Steve Balderson (which probably embarrasses the director no end but hey, I’d have kept those in too!).

Actually what comes through more than that, if I can contradict myself, is the way that people open up their souls to Steve, or at least to his answerphone. There’s some incredibly candid admissions here and a great deal of poetry (not literally). Choosing the right question to ask, in order to generate a detailed and interesting response, is a skill - it’s one I try to practice on this site. Clearly, with those three carefully chosen words, Steve has tapped into something that is just right, that works brilliantly. He could have asked “What do you find sexy?” or “What is the sexiest thing you can think of?” - but neither of those would have got the same responses.

Of course, we don’t know how many other calls Steve received which he couldn’t use, or to what extent he has cherry-picked the good stuff from the 90 or so included here. But that doesn’t matter. That’s his job as film-maker. Let’s face it: he didn’t have to write a script for this one, or direct any actors, or worry about lighting or costumes or make-up or sets or special effects or should we use DV or should we stick with 35mm? The skill in evidence here, and the talent, lies in the way that these messages have been selected, edited, arranged and interspersed with the occasional clip of automated answerphone voice. This isn’t just some random collection of sexy wackiness (or wacky sexiness) cobbled together. It’s been made, and made extraordinarily well.

The visuals, which is obviously what makes this a film rather than just a CD, are stock photos, mostly tinted or toned, which sometimes depict what is being described and at other times seem more tangential. The rostrum camera (I’m sure it’s not done with a rostrum nowadays, but you know what I mean) is constantly, sedately moving, panning, zooming. After all, this is supposed to be a movie.

Some of the callers identify themselves, some don’t. Steve’s address book, it must be said, is pretty eclectic and the people who call him are, almost by definition, an eccentric bunch. Here you’ll find actors, writers, musicians, artists, drag queens and some of those people for whom one can never find a more specific term than ‘performer’. They naturally give a much more elaborate and hence interesting view of what is sexy than might be gleaned from my address book or yours, but also sometimes a view which is disturbing or insecure - there’s a scary pathos to be glimpsed behind some of the forced eccentricity. Some of the callers, it must be said, sound like they have been smoking, drinking or otherwise ingesting various substances before calling. On the other hand, maybe they naturally sound like that.

Possibly because I’m British, or maybe just because I move in different circles to Steve, most of the callers are people I’m not familiar with. All their names are in the end credits and also on the website where most of them link through to biographical notes. Among those I did recognise are horror actress Tiffany Shepis (NyMpha), the ubiquitous Lloyd Kaufman, Russ Meyer starlet Tura Satana, ex-Gogo Jane Wiedlin (whose limited but deeply wonderful acting CV includes scene-stealing roles in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Clue and Star Trek IV), magician Penn Jillette and porn legend Ron Jeremy. But it should be stressed that not knowing who these folk are doesn’t matter a jot.

Phone Sex is much more than a weird-for-its-own-sake novelty and much more than just a video installation piece (though it could be shown as such). It’s a remarkably entertaining, intriguing and thought-provoking feature film which will go down well at festivals and could well become a cult hit. It further cements Steve Balderson’s reputation as One to Watch.

And you know what? Just the idea that a friend of mine has Penn Jillette, Ron Jeremy and Jane Wiedlin in his address book is, frankly, awesome.

MJS rating: A

Underbelly

Director: Steve Balderson
Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Pleasant Gehman
Country: USA
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.dikenga.com

[Please bear in mind when reading this review that it is based on an incomplete advance copy of the film. - MJS]

Steve Balderson has made five feature films and I have loved every one of them. Two dramatic features – the blackly comic Pep Squad and the achingly beautiful Firecracker; two extraordinary documentaries – Wamego and Wamego Strikes Back; and one fascinating avant-garde film – Phone Sex. At the end of October 2007 Steve was honoured with a three-night mini-season of his work in New York, which Film Threat called “the most deserved tribute of all time”. The day after the last NY screening, I received a screener disc of Steve’s sixth feature, his belly-dancing documentary Underbelly. I couldn’t wait to see what he had come up with.

I have always strived for honesty in these reviews and that’s why it breaks my heart to say that I was disappointed with Underbelly. Not just a bit, but really very disappointed. It’s not that it’s a bad film, it’s not that it’s dull. No, Underbelly commits a sin greater than either of these. It’s ordinary.

This is, in a nutshell, 100 minutes of talking heads and documentary footage about the world of belly-dancing and specifically a dancer/teacher named Princess Farhana, aka Steve’s friend Pleasant Gehman. And that’s all it is. It’s a Steve Balderson film and there should be something more, but there isn’t. None of Steve’s first five films could be put into a nutshell, not even something as simple in its premise as Phone Sex. But I could stop this review now and you’ll have learned everything you need to know about Underbelly. It’s not, to coin a phrase, Balderson-esque. Frankly, this could have been made by anyone. And that’s got to disappoint any film fan who has started exploring the director’s oeuvre.

There are other problems with the film, not least that it doesn’t know whether it’s a documentary about belly-dancing or about Princess Farhana. It tries to be both and ends up being neither. We learn very little about Pleasant, other than that she had Hollywood parents and was involved in the punk scene (we don’t even know whether this was real, 1976-77, safety-pins-and-spit British punk or whether it was the late 1970s, CBGB’s New York punk scene). She comes across as a loud, friendly, confident, enjoyably filthy-minded party person who genuinely enjoys both performing and teaching. Most other interviewees seem more sedate although some of them are not as articulate as a documentary usually requires: too many ‘so yeah like’s and unfinished sentences. One or two people who speak to camera in the documentary scenes have the love-me-look-at-me-love-me desperation of the low-ranked, low self-esteem performer-wannabe which is actually perversely fascinating from a pop psychology point of view.

So if we learn comparatively little about Pleasant Gehman, what do we learn about belly-dancing? Again, the answer sadly is not much. There is virtually nothing on the history of the art-form, beyond a couple of observations that it has been around for a few thousand years, and nothing at all on how it has spread across the globe. The physics and anatomy of belly-dancing is fascinating: what sort of muscle control is required to ripple your belly like that and how can the head be held so balanced while the torso moves? In short: how do you do it? But that’s not touched upon. There’s nothing at all on the music or the costumes. One lady comments that she was dancing in a club during the period that the hostages were held in the American embassy in Tehran and that she was worried about people’s reaction and this could have prompted a potentially fascinating examination of how this facet of middle-eastern culture is regarded in 21st century America, given the current antipathy towards (and ignorance of) the Middle East in that country. But no, that’s not here either.

Probably the biggest omission is the audience. We see several shows of various sizes in unlikely venues ranging from an Iowa car dealership to a Northampton cattle market but the question is never asked, let alone answered: who watches belly-dancing, apart from other belly-dancers?

There is a lot of stuff about how empowering it all is and the confidence thing and women being happy with their bodies and suchlike but frankly a lot of the comments could be applied to all manner of female-dominated physical activities, from lapdancing to lacrosse. We are given no insight into what makes belly-dancing different, only what makes it good and special – and everything is good and special to those involved in it.

There are a few references to the different styles of belly-dancing but, frustratingly once more, we are told nothing about these different styles or their various cultural origins. From the neophyte’s viewpoint, it all looks the same, with a fairly limited repertoire of moves. Of course there’s a great deal to it and layers of complexity which could be peeled back, but any artistic form looks much of a muchness to someone with an outsider’s view. Someone who knows nothing about hip-hop probably couldn’t tell A Tribe Called Quest from 50 Cent; someone with no knowledge of classical music would have difficulty distinguishing between Vivaldi and Rimsky-Korsakov; to someone who can’t stand anime (such as myself), Miyazaki’s work seems no different from any of the rest of it. Do you see where I’m going with this? A feature-length documentary about belly-dancing is an opportunity (God knows they don’t exactly come along very often) for experts within the field to impart some knowledge, to enlighten the general public about the hidden complexities of what they do. But that doesn’t happen here.

I’m not suggesting that Steve should have tried to cover every aspect of the history, geography, sociology, politics and anatomy of belly-dancing in one film; it’s up to him as director to decide what to concentrate on and what approach to take. But a film like this needs to concentrate on something in order to justify the exclusion of areas about which the audience might be curious. Underbelly doesn’t concentrate on anything, as far as I can tell, but still excludes stuff, leaving the viewer not much wiser about belly-dancing – or indeed, about Pleasant Gehman - than he or she was before. There doesn’t seem to be a point to this film. What is it trying to say? All five of Steve’s previous films were very personal projects and this one clearly isn’t. It’s a film about his friend and her world and consequently there’s no real passion driving the work. It documents when it should explore and explain. Instead of a journey into the world of Princess Farhana, it’s just a bunch of talking heads and dance clips.

Surprisingly, the former outnumber the latter by a considerable margin. The one thing I would expect from a belly-dance documentary, whatever else it may strive to do, is plenty of footage of people belly-dancing. But we’re nearly half an hour in before we get the first decent look at a performance and even then it’s annoyingly short. We want movement and poise, we want beads and chiffon, we want shimmying and stepping. Where is the dancing? I’ve never seen a proper belly-dance performance – realistically, who has? – and it would help the film enormously to start off with an unedited, well-shot sequence of someone dancing, maybe combined with a few captions bringing us up to speed with the facts and figures of belly-dancing. How old is it? How popular is it? And so on.

The interviews themselves are shot in a low-budget style, with a single handheld or tripod-mounted camera, mostly by Steve himself although a second unit was used for the British footage. Sometimes the light is slightly too bright, sometimes the room is slightly too echoey, in places there is an almost guerrilla feel to the interviews but this is not reflected in the post-production which could have used this roughness for an effect of immediacy and in-your-face cinema verite. Instead these are just competently-but-prosaically edited-together talking heads with a little subtitle caption to introduce each person. Several of the interviews include cuts between sentences, where the soundtrack is continuous but the image jumps, and in most documentaries these would normally be covered up with a cutaway to a still or some other footage. In other words, this is exactly the sort of situation that requires more dancing footage. I can’t understand why Steve keeps showing us people sitting on sofas when we could be seeing them (or people like them) wiggling their stomachs to the sound of a funky tabla.

As for the interviewees, some of them are described on-screen as just ‘belly-dancer’ while others have either a website address or a note that they are the producer or organiser of something. The web thing, while it’s very 21st century, doesn’t actually tell us who these people are. Professional dancers? Teachers? Enthusiastic amateurs? And the events or organisations which we are told some people run are things that mean nothing. What is really needed, to give these people’s views some context, is a fuller caption at the start, maybe over some footage or stills of them dancing: “Nora Jenkins has been dancing for five years since her husband Bill died. She is a 46 year-old bus driver from Chicago.” Something like that. Because without really knowing who these people are, what their interests are, what their relevance is, what their experience is, their words don’t mean a great deal.

Probably the best interviewee isn’t a belly-dancer at all but the owner of a shop specialising in world music. In fact it is precisely his semi-outsider view, from the fringe of the belly-dancing world, that makes his thoughts and observations more interesting than all the women sitting on sofas saying that belly-dancing empowers them and Pleasant Gehman is a great lady.

The film is divided up into chapters with little title cards but only two of these sections show real promise. One is a part of the film discussing male belly-dancers; who even knew there was such a thing? Three are interviewed and shown dancing, and various female interviewees give their opinions on how male dancers differ from female ones. There is a tremendously trenchant observation that men tend to dance externally, presenting themselves to the audience, while women dance more internally, dancing for their own pleasure.

The other part with some spark in it deals with fusion belly-dancing and the contrasting views of the young radicals versus the purists. There are goth belly dancers, there are burlesque belly dancers. Gehman is shown doing a routine which starts in a clown outfit and finishes with her wearing nothing but a thong and pasties. This undoubtedly incorporates some belly-dancing moves but it’s basically a Lily St.Cyr-style striptease. Ironically, the movie starts off with belly-dancers vigourously defending the art-form because some people ignorantly assume, what with the skimpy costumes and pelvic gyrations and all, that it’s akin to stripping. But then, an hour later, when a belly-dancer actually does strip, no-one is challenged over this, which seems a missed opportunity. Nevertheless it’s interesting to hear belly-dancing purists condemning those people who (as they perceive it) learn a few moves and then start mixing the style with other dance forms. The danger is that belly-dancing in its pure, traditional form may die out.

There is actually a fairly lengthy sequence about burlesque which, while it’s evidently another of Gehman’s enthusiasms, sits oddly in what professes to be a belly-dancing film. Ironically, this was probably the part I enjoyed most and found most interesting although this may be a personal reaction because, while I know absolutely zip about belly-dancing, I do have a passing interest in burlesque. I’ve read a couple of books, seen a couple of Bettie Page movies, so I’m not starting from a position of complete ignorance like I am with the belly-dancing.

Anyway, here’s what all this boils down to, and it’s something which occurred to me about halfway through the film. Underbelly has been made - whether deliberately or accidentally - for people who are already involved in the American belly-dancing scene. If you know who these people are and you’ve seen their websites and you’ve been to their events, then this will all make sense to you. There is, for example, discussion and footage of some big annual bash called Tribal Fest but no attempt to explain what it is, the assumption being that we all know about Tribal Fest even if we’ve never been there, the same way that we all know about the Cannes Film Festival or the Olympic Games. Except that we don’t. All it needs is a caption or one person telling us, in a sentence or two, what’s going on here.

The Wamego documentaries didn’t assume that we all knew about producing and distributing films (and in any case, as films about the film business, their target audience naturally has some interest in the subject matter). Unless Steve is planning only to show Underbelly at belly-dance events, I fear that he has seriously misjudged his audience.

Off on a slight tangent now. The deepest, darkest reaches of Amazon.com contain some unexplored tributaries where specialist documentary DVDs lurk. Every interest has them, whether you’re into cross-stitch or car-repairing, budgie-breeding or turkey-hunting. They’re usually rough and ready, from the Dad-can-I-borrow-the-camcorder school of film-making, but they sell in small numbers to the faithful and nobody else ever sees them so that’s all right then. Belly-dancing probably has its own films like that (one of the interviewees refers to “DVDs - and not even my DVDs”) and I suspect that Steve Balderson has made a film which, while it’s undoubtedly better produced than most of these things, has the same lack of appeal to anyone outside of the world it documents.

Steve’s not a belly-dancer (at least, I don’t think he is!) but ironically it may be his absence from the film which condemns it. He stays silent behind the camera, all his questions carefully edited out. Perhaps if this was a film about Steve Balderson exploring the curious world of American belly-dancing, it might be more personal - a film-maker’s journey - and thereby not only more like Steve’s other films but also more interesting for the non-dancer. There’s no authorial voice here; that’s why it’s just a run-of-the-mill documentary, rather than a Steve Balderson documentary.

Just as a drama or comedy requires a central character with whom we can emphasise, so does a documentary. The reason why far future stories from The Sleeper Wakes to Futurama often have a present-day protagonist is because that person is us, the viewer, and as this strange new world is explained to the sleeper awoken, so it is explained to us. Well, special interest sections of society, largely off the cultural radar, are like the far future. It’s a world where the basic truths remain the same but the details and the context are beyond our understanding. Who are these people and why do they do what they do? What are the rules, the structures and the limitations of this world in which we find ourselves? We need someone freshly awoken, who is as new to this world as us, to ask the questions for us and, if necessary, translate the answers. A wandering camera can’t do that on its own.

We also need a plot, a quest, the film-maker’s journey as hero’s journey. The reason why documentary features like Roger and Me or Supersize Me (spot the connection?) worked is because they documented the film-maker on a mission. Probably the best comparison to Underbelly among successful documentary features (at least, the ones I’ve seen) would be Spellbound, which introduced its audiences to competitive spelling bees, a world as alien to most of us as professional belly-dancing. But Spellbound had a plot and characters, following several children and their families as they competed through the regional and national levels of that odd competition. Underbelly doesn’t seem to have a plot, or any characters apart from Pleasant Gehman, everyone else either wandering in and out of their own scenes or sitting on a sofa and chatting.

This is a picaresque documentary, a series of seemingly unconnected episodes. Here is Pleasant Gehman in Northampton, here she is in a car dealership, here she is on a cruise ship, here she is at Tribal Fest. There is no sense of progression or how any of these sequences relate to any of the others. At the end of the film - and this is, if anything, it’s most inexcusable flaw - neither Pleasant Gehman nor the viewer has changed in any noticeable way.

Finally, in what I depressingly note has turned out to be a barrage of criticism (although, I hope, constructive criticism) there are two points to make. First, I could not work out why (a) almost all of the footage of Gehman is in black and white while everything else is in colour, and (b) some of the Gehman footage actually is in colour. It’s a curious decision which has not been carried out one hundred per cent. Mainly, I just could not see the point of monochrome belly-dancing footage. Surely colour - the costumes and the skin tones - is part of the art-form’s appeal. The second point - and this is the quickest, simplest fix of all but stung me personally - is that a caption misspells the name of my home town of Leicester. Unforgivable!

So what is to be done? As explained at the top, this is not the finished version so there will be some changes. But, the spelling of provincial English cities aside, these will need to be more than cosmetic. There are fundamental problems with the selection and arrangement of the footage which makes up this film. Documentary-making is a curious art; there’s no script and no way for the film-maker to know in advance precisely where he is going to end up, although it helps to at least aim for somewhere as a finishing point, however much that may change during production. If Steve was aiming somewhere with Underbelly, he got diverted along the way and has ended up just wandering through the world of belly-dancing, without a clearly defined sense of purpose. His audience, inescapably drawn to travel with him, becomes frustrated when we realise that we’re not actually going anywhere specific, we’re just out for a leisurely stroll that will end up back where we started.

Somewhere on Steve’s shelves are rows and rows of tapes and/or discs, hours of footage from which Underbelly has been culled and constructed. I have no doubt that there is a terrific film somewhere on that shelf and I have absolutely no doubt that a film-maker as single-minded and undeniably talented as Steve Balderson can fashion that film in a way that no-one else could, surprising and delighting everyone who watches it.

But with Underbelly I think that Steve has sold himself short.

MJS rating: C+
review originally posted 2007