April 16, 2010

Long before the days of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog or the underground films of Bruce LaBruce, there were Brothers Kuchar. The twin brothers were in fact fathers of independent cinema decades ago. But their work lives on and has been captured in a new film that explores their influence. For WBEZ, film critic Jonathan Miller has this review of It Came From Kuchar.

April 16, 2010

"There are no second acts in American life," some nobody by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald said. Hogwash. George and Mike Kuchar have had productive, ongoing careers long after their initial burst of notoriety as forerunners of the New York underground film scene in the late ’50s and ’60s. If there is any justice in this world, next year’s release of Jennifer Kroot’s documentary It Came from Kuchar will launch the twin brothers on an equally improbable third act.

April 14, 2010

"Not everyone digs underground movies, but those who do can dig them here." This backhanded compliment could easily serve as an epitaph to a pair of Bronx-born twin brothers, but as you'll quickly discover watching It Came from Kuchar, Jennifer M. Kroot's incisive, humane and at times hilarious portrait of George and Mike Kuchar, these guys are still very much alive and kicking, and making almost indescribably crazy movies. With witty and wise guest-star appearances from Kuchar fans John Waters, Atom Egoyan, Buck Henry and B. Ruby Rich, It Came from Kuchar is virtually a 90-minute seminar on American filmmakers who defy easy labels. Kroot demonstrates how early Kuchar epics like Sins of the Fleshapoids were inspired by Douglas Sirk melodramas, while in turn prompting commercial imitators such as Roger Vadim's Barbarella.

April 14, 2010

If the Kuchar brothers had never existed, they would have to have been invented. The world's cinema culture needs eccentric visionaries like George and Mike Kuchar, twin brothers from the Bronx with billionaire imaginations and $1.98 resources.

Like many would-be auteurs, the Kuchars started young, staging makeshift spectacles for their borrowed Super 8 camera at age twelve. The working-class boys — their father was a truck driver — went to commercial-art high school and dived headfirst into the New York art film scene of the late Fifties/early Sixties alongside Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol.

April 9, 2010

"They believe going after money is selling out in a way . . . They should be knighted.”

That’s John Waters on the underground-film legends George and Mike Kuchar in the fun-to-watch bio-doc “It Came From Kuchar.”

April 8, 2010

George and Mike Kuchar, twin brothers from the Bronx, are among the most prolific and inventive American filmmakers of the past half-century, and perhaps the most eccentric. Avid moviegoers as children, they began making 8 millimeter epics, and after graduating from the High School of Industrial Arts in New York they gravitated toward the thriving underground film scene. Shooting cheaply, devising homemade special effects and casting friends and acquaintances, the Kuchars produced — sometimes in collaboration, sometimes apart — touchstones of the 1960s cinematic avant-garde like “Corruption of the Damned,” “Sins of the Fleshapoids” and “Hold Me While I’m Naked.”

April 6, 2010

A few years and 2,500 miles apart, teenagers inspired by photos of Dad in uniform and From Here to Eternity undertake their separate 8mm war epics. Both are the works of prodigies weaned on double features, later loved or reviled for holding on to their childlike innocence. Little Stevie Spielberg shot 1961's Escape to Nowhere under the clear Arizona skies; 1957's The Naked and the Nude is the earliest surviving title by two lanky, pimple-popping, MAD magazine–reading wiseacres, 15-year-old twins George and Mike Kuchar, the Goncourts of Bronx County.

March 28, 2010

February 11, 2010

In the 1990s, Jennifer Kroot was a student of the underground film legend George Kuchar at the San Francisco Art Institute and later performed in several of his films. Kroot’s documentary on the influential Kuchar brothers, It Came from Kuchar, will play at the Walker Art Center on February 11 and at Anthology Films Archives April 9–15.

November 23, 2009

In this audio interview Emmy Winner Charlotte Robinson talks with B Ruby Rich, American Scholar and Film Critic about Director Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary “It Came From Kuchar.” Long before YouTube, there were the outrageous, no-budget movies of underground, filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar. George and Mike grew up in the Bronx in the 1950’s. At the age of twelve, they became obsessed with Hollywood melodramas and began making their own homespun melodramas with their aunt’s 8mm camera. They used their friends and family as actors and their Bronx neighborhood as their set. Early Kuchar titles featured in this film include “I Was A Teenage Rumpot” and “Born of the Wind”.

August 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

June 16, 2009

“It Came From Kuchar” gleefully piles on everything anyone could want in a docu on the fabulous Kuchar brothers, whose deliriously campy zero-budget mellers — with titles like “Hold Me While I’m Naked” or “Sins of the Fleshapoids” — enlivened many otherwise somber evenings of ’60s underground cinema. Critics and aficionados seek to distill the essence of the twins’ work, while clips from the films in question unspool in a fever dream of compelling non sequiturs. Meanwhile, George and Mike Kuchar themselves hold forth unstoppably. A must-see for filmmakers of all persuasions, Jennifer M. Kroot’s docu could spark accompanying retros.

June 14, 2009

While the brothers have been well known in the film world for decades - their odd, homemade pictures have been screened around the globe - the public would be forgiven for never having heard of them. To help right that wrong, San Francisco documentary filmmaker Jennifer Kroot, who was a student of George Kuchar's at SFAI, has made "It Came From Kuchar," which will be screened at the Frameline Film Festival. An award will also be presented to the brothers.

April 2, 2009

It Came From Kuchar review

A documentary about the Kuchar twins, known in the 1960s as the 8mm Mozarts...

March 20, 2009

So you've never heard of the (semi)legendary fraternal-twin filmmaking team of George and Mike Kuchar, the visionary duo behind such ultralow-budget, 8mm underground classics as the truly amazing Hold Me While I'm Naked and Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof? Not to worry. This wickedly engrossing documentary details the rise of the Bronx brothers and explains why everyone from Jonas Mekas to John Waters thinks the Kuchars are sui generis when it comes to American underground moviemaking.

March 10, 2009

It Came From Kuchar is the hilarious, touching, character-driven story of the legendary, underground filmmaking twins, George and Mike Kuchar, and how their outrageous, no-budget movies inspired generations of filmmakers. Director Jennifer M. Kroot on the film It Came From Kuchar which screens at this year's South by Southwest Film.