Q+A: “Winnebago Man” Director Ben Steinbauer Longs for the Grainy, Degraded Video Tape

A documentary about one of the earliest accidental video stars could have easily felt forced or exploitative. But Winnebago Man, which opens nationwide today in select theaters, is far from that. The film chronicles director Ben Steinbauer’s quest to profile a reclusive former Winnebago salesman famous for his foul-mouthed rants during outtakes on a 1980s promotional video.

(See Maybe Winnebago Man Wasn’t So Angry After All )

But while Jack Rebney, or “Winnebago Man” or “the angriest man on Earth,” may now be an Internet star, Ben’s curiosity began offline. In the pre-Youtube days, “viral videos” were rare commodities, passed around not by email or blogs but by hand on VHS tapes that slowly degraded as they were copied. They were watched often in groups around a television, not a computer screen, and were known only to an underground few.

Streaming video changed all that, and more. Alongside a human portrait, “Winnebago Man” highlights the shift from old, analogue media to a media world that’s always on, hyper-aware and easily distracted. Jack, whose familiarity with film over video, which make outtakes possible to begin with, isn’t the only one whose head is left spinning; Ben wants to go back to the video tape. We spoke with the director yesterday about making the film, how the video began to spread, and what makes Jack an everyman.

How much did you have to coach Jack, and how much of a stage man is he?
No coaching at all on my part. That, I hope, is one of the things people enjoy seeing about the movie, that you're really on this ride with me and it's largely about my relationship to him and his reaction to me making the film about him.

One of the questions I get a lot from people after they've seen the movie is "what would you have done if this didn't happen," or if this ending didn't come about or whatever and the honest answer is, "I don't know." That was part of the joy and pain of making the film. I was just trusting that I had this great character with this built-in conflict and if I stuck with it the story would resolve.

Apparently Spike Jonze made one hundred individual copies on VHS tape, wrapped them, and gave them out as Christmas presents, which is totally amazing. I love that story. And apparently Ben Affleck is a huge fan and [he's quoted] Jack: "I'm blinded by that fcking hot light." It's been quoted on Sponge Bob Squarepants and apparently on the last season of the Sopranos.*

How did you get interested in the story and when was the first time that you saw Jack?
I was handed a VHS tape in about 2002 and I saw it, probably a lot like the way you saw it, which is, you know, after a couple drinks you're over at a buddy's house and they're like "you gotta check this out" and "you haven't seen Winnebago man? Oh my god."

And you pop in the tape and you say, "Oh my god, I can't believe I haven't seen this." It's one of those things you sort of think is fake at first, it's like too good to be true. It seems scripted or something you're not supposed to be seeing. And I asked for my own copy and I proceeded to show it to everybody that I knew and then. So that was 2002, and then in 2005 when video sharing sites and YouTube and all that made it possible for things to be viewed all over the world, instantaneously I watched how this clip that up to that point had only been known to tape traders, kind of underground, became this internationally recognized thing, and it was quoted in Spongebob Squarepants and 30 Rock and Paulie Walnuts and The Sopranos said a line from it.

It was just blowing my mind and I thought, it's entirely possible that this guy, when it was on VHS tape, didn't know anything about these outtakes, but now I bet he knows about them and I wonder how he's reacting 20 years later to being known in this way. So that was the impetus.

How did Jack respond, and how did he feel about becoming an internet celebrity?
I think he responded like people respond to anything in their life. He went through all the classic phases: denial and anger and then depression and sadness. If he were here, he'd say, "Oh, bullsh*t. It didn't matter at all." The thing you see in the movie is his physical response. You know, like you can kind of see it washing over him in all these different ways. This is a particularly modern phenomenon, to be known in a way, or lampooned in this sort of international way that you have no control over. His response to it from this old-school sort of news anchor tradition where you didn't have outtakes, let alone the ability to spread the outtakes like this, has really resonated with people. That’s because it dramatizes that very old way of making media and this new hyper-aware media culture.

You mentioned that this video was very popular with filmmakers in particular. This was something a lot of the Hollywood people and a lot of the dub room people were watching?
Yeah this got spread widely amongst, you said it, dub room people in either the ad world or the filmmaking business in Hollywood, where you have a lot of tape and you have a lot of tape deck material at your disposal and you sort of collect this material as it comes through. And this tape lived in that world and that's how it was spread most rapidly, we think.

Through the course of making this movie, I found there were all these stories I didn't know when I started out. Apparently Spike Jonze made one hundred individual copies on VHS tape, wrapped them, and gave them out as Christmas presents, which is totally amazing. I love that story. And apparently Ben Affleck is a huge fan and [he's quoted] Jack: "I'm blinded by that f*cking hot light." It's been quoted on Sponge Bob Squarepants and apparently on the last season of the Sopranos, which was pretty controversial.

It's all these strange references to it that keep popping up because it's just so appropriate. Like right when you came over to mark this, you could say: "I don't have time to mark this motherf*cker." Who doesn't want to say that? Or like, "I'm blinded by this hot light." "Why can't I – I wrote this stuff. Why can' I remember it?"

In the age of Youtube and Facebook, do you see people as being more sensitive or paranoid about being recorded, and what kind of impact will that have on our culture?
I don't know if there's going be that's something lost in our culture because we're more sensitive now or more media savvy. I think it's just a change in the language. One of the things people responded to this in the original Winnebago man is this sense of innocence, this almost naïveté on Jack's part. He was familiar with the news on film in the '50s and '60s but was unfamiliar with the concept that you could keep the cameras rolling. And so in the late '80s, when these guys were shooting this industrial video, they were in between takes, just constantly rolling. That was something new for him.

And this idea of spreading video instantly and virally is something he never could have foreseen, so I think there is a twenty year-old understanding of the media that is now on display when we watch that. We're all wiser and older and understand that if we say something funny right now or get nervous and throw up on the table or something falls on my head and I fell over and it's funny, you guys are probably going to put that on YouTube. And it's fine. I'm prepared for that. I think that makes us more careful? I don't know. But there's still plenty of bloopers. You get on YouTube and you see it. Maybe because there's so much of it now it's less special. I don't know.

What do you think it is people love about Jack Rabney? Is it that he's abrasive or is it that he's on this weird set? Why do you think people identify with the frustration in that?
Well, in terms of the clip, I think what people respond to is the fact that Jack is angry certainly and frustrated but it's mainly at himself. And he's commenting in an almost existential way about the performance that he's giving the moment, which is so unusual and so endearing because it's like he's letting you into his mind, he's commenting on like: "Do you believe any of that sh*t I just said?" or "It's like I can't make my f*cking mind work."

And you watch him beat himself in front of cameras and I think that if it was something nasty, like the Christian Bale rants or Alec Baldwin leaving that terrible phone message for his daughter. You know, things that are truly nasty. You know people certainly listen to and I've listened to those things and snickered, but I've never listened to them again. People that I know have seen Winnebago Man, they've listened tens, if not hundreds and thousands of times.

That speaks to the idea that there is something resonant or universal that you can relate to in Jack being frustrated with himself. Because we've all been there. We've had a shi*ty boss or a bad day. Jack is that type of person that's willing to say what's on his mind, consequences be damned. And I think your question—like what's his appeal beyond the clip? Well I feel he's one of those types of people, like Werner Herzog, who I could listen to, I mean listen to his grocery list, and be totally fascinated.

He's known as a guy who got caught swearing a blue streak and so it's weird to say that he's very well-spoken, but he is. He's got this stately delivery, this Shakespearean vernacular, it's almost alarming. If he calls up to cancel a magazine subscription I'm interested. Or if he's addressing an audience, he does all these things in the same stately formal manner. So I think even if he wasn't known as Winnebago man, if he wasn't a character in this context, I think he'd be an interesting character in some other way.

How have people reacted to Jack and how has he been reacting since you screened the film?
Well, the way people have been reacting to Jack when we've screened the movie has been in this way where people will say, "Jack reminds me of my uncle or my friend or my dad," and they personalize him in a way that's really intimate.

And that's been amazing to experience. But I don't think it's as simple as we're laughing with or we're laughing at, because I think there's a combination of things happening. But I firmly believe that if it was just schadenfreude, like that nasty intention where we're just snickering at him, people would not have that same response. You know what I mean? You really come to care about this guy and understand this unique position that's he's in, and like him as a person. And his response has been to kind of be overwhelmed by that.

He came to our premiere at SXSW [in 2009]. Like most indie films we were editing like 36 hours before the film. We flew Jack in from his mountain hermitage and had a Winnebago parked out in front. The movie plays and he put the lights down so he could come in and not been seen. He sits in the crowd and listens to it. Everybody was laughing and they really loved it.

Afterwards he goes up to do a Q&A and gets this five-minute long standing ovation that was just incredible. I don't think that anyone could have predicted. As only he could do, he quotes André Gide: "A man without anger is no man at all." And he immediately quoted JFK and says, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

And if you see the movie, you see it's important to him to get his political beliefs out. The struggle in the movie is me trying to get him talk about himself as the Winnebago Man, and he wants to talk about his political thoughts. So it's been really surprising for him to hear that people do really care about what he has to say and that they really care about him as a person and he hasn't necessarily had that experience before. And it's been a real joy for me personally to see that in him.

INTERVIEW BY Brendan FitzGerald. Research assistance by Felipe Cabrera and Peisin Yang Lazo