December 23, 2005
Sharing a Bronx childhood immersed in movies, twin brothers Mike and George Kuchar developed during the '50s and '60s into two of the most influential underground filmmakers in America ? while still in their teens and early 20s. Possessed by vivid imagination and ribald taste, the brothers were instrumental in giving rise to intentional camp cinema, and did so well before Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Susan Sontag's ?Notes on Camp.? And presaging Warhol, they created a factory of their own ? ?Hollywood in the Bronx? ? by using friends and other co-conspirators for their madcap 8mm deconstructions of melodrama, sci-fi, and horror.
Read MoreOctober 16, 2004
You've got to admire the crazy gumption of moviemaking maniacs who will let nothing stop them from loading a camera, pointing it and letting it rip. In the 1950's and 60's, when the twin filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar began creating zany no-budget B-movie mini-epics, it wasn't as easy to play Cecil B. De Mille (or Douglas Sirk, one of their idols) as it is in today's digital climate. All four of the newly restored short films to be shown tonight at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the avant-garde arm of the New York Film Festival are 8-millimeter silent movies made from 1959 to 1963. Here the word silent applies only to the dialogue, which is supplied by titles.
Read MoreOctober 5, 2004
"What do you want from me, you hideous cetacean?" So spews a grubby philanderer to his portly, blubbering frau—she done up in housedress and bouffant, he sporting JD jacket, both gesticulating to pinpoint excess against an aural backdrop of rockabilly squealing saxophone and teen-tragic doo-wop. Shot on lurid 8mm color in the late '50s, George Kuchar's mini-mock-melodrama Sylvia's Promiseprovides the long-suspected missing link between Written on the Wind and Pink Flamingos. Indeed, guest host John Waters will share the Lincoln Center stage with underground legends George and Mike Kuchar when this and three other of the duo's recently preserved films, blown up to near respectable 16mm, unreel as part of this year's Views From the Avant-Garde sidebar of the New York Film Festival.
Read MoreJuly 26, 2004
In 1964, Susan Sontag published her seminal essay, “Notes on Camp” (1). Seeking to define an increasingly prevalent cultural trend, she described a sensibility of passionate extravagance that cannibalised other forms of both high and popular art, even as it violated their most sacred tenets in its seeming trivialisation of traditionally serious subject matter. Two years after its publication, American underground filmmaker George Kuchar created Hold Me While I’m Naked, a film that has come to stand as one of camp’s defining texts.
Read MoreNovember 11, 1999
The sudden death, disappearance, or withdrawal of a key actor during the shooting of a big Hollywood movie is the kind of Industry debacle that drives producers into a panic, capsizes multi-million dollar productions, and sends studio flunkies scrambling for damage control with press and investors alike.
Read MoreAugust 6, 1997
In the 1960s, when independent films were still called "underground" and nascent filmmakers didn't fashion their work as Hollywood audition pieces, twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar were stars. They made 8mm and 16mm movies for peanuts, gave them titles like "I Was a Teenage Rumpot" and "The Naked and the Nude," and stocked them with lurid obsessions, taboo fantasies and raunchy thrills.
Read MoreMay 1, 1997
A humorous collection of autobiographical literary low-browsing, low-budget filmmaking philosophy, and tips by the legendary twin, underground filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar; a reflection on their flickering universe and the famous and infamous who drop into it from time-to-time. Original illustrations by Mike and George Kuchar and a selection of never-before-seen photos.
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