Maybe "Winnebago Man" Wasn't So Angry After All

If you don’t know “Winnebago Man,” you’re about to.

His real name is Jack Rebney, and he is headed for the silver screen, in a documentary set to open this week. But his path started on video cassette, over twenty years ago.

Angry and explosive outtakes of him from a 1988 industrial film about Winnebagoes were copied on VHS and passed around 16 years before Youtube showed up to make sharing random videos an easy and commonplace activity. He is one of the original viral celebrities, from back when the Internet was still in diapers.

In 2005, filmmaker Ben Steinbauer – a recipient of the tape at some point in its viral dissemination – set out to find Jack Rebney to explore the effects of “unintentional celebrity” on a man who gets famous for his embarrassing moments (a compilation of his charged comments from the Winnebago film has almost 2 million views on the Youtube). The project proved more difficult than expected, and Steinbauer ended up enlisting the help of a private detective to find Rebney, who had gone into the mountains to live as a hermit. As Steinbauer explains,

He was just someone whose expectations for the human race were way too high. He wanted to sequester himself, live on top of a mountain and read Immanuel Kant.

Trailer for “Winnebago Man”

In an interview with Flavorwire, Steinbauer talks about how the concept of the film evolved as he learned more about the man that is Jack Rebney:

Once I found him the story became about something different. He is such a dynamic and magnetic personality that his personal narrative became the focus of the documentary. He is a retired news producer from an earlier era of media making, which was a sharp contrast and made him a great subject to help explore this new idea of unwanted internet fame.

Plus he's f***ing hilarious!

Steinbauer was influenced by the growing genre of strange documentaries such as King of Kong (see our feature about the video game high scores community), Man on Wire, and other films about people who catch catfish with their hands and prisoners who ride in rodeos, in which strange aspects of peoples lives prove to be inherently very intriguing and amusing to an international audience.

Jack Rebney, aka “Winnebago Man”, at

SXSW

in 2009, received two standing ovations and stuck around for three hours to speak with people.

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There is certainly no shortage of potential subjects for documentaries about people who have made a fool of themselves on Youtube. The fact that this film has already done well on the film festival circuit suggests that maybe there is a market for investigative documentaries about strangers we only peripherally know for something stupid they once did.

Apparently “Winnebago Man” merchandise is on its way, too. South Park made an episode about youtube celebrities and the “theoretical dollars” they earned, but as we discovered at the viral internet conference ROFLCon, as David After Dentist has demonstrated – and as Steinbauer may yet prove – there are real dollars at stake.

See our ROFLCon documentary, about other internet celebrities and read about the downsides of unintentional celebrity on another viral internet star, Star Wars Kid