GEORGE KUCHAR

Vice: Were there a lot of big movie palaces in the Bronx when you were teenagers in the 50s?

George Kuchar:

L’Avventura

How often did you go?

Do you remember the ones that made you want to make movies?

Marla English is criminally forgotten. Did you follow certain stars?

You and Mike started making movies when you got a camera for your 12th birthday. Was it expensive to process the film?

How did two teenagers from the Bronx connect with the underground-film crowd in Manhattan?

Ken Jacobs helped you guys out, right?

Even though you were teenagers and didn’t have an art background like those other people, you were accepted?

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Where was Warhol in all of this?

Hold Me While I’m Naked

He got a lot of his ideas from you and Jack Smith.

It’s funny that right after the macho Beat era, here come all these queeny guys like Smith and Warhol.

Was it hard to direct actors to work so over the top? I’m thinking of Bob Cowan as the android in Sins of the Fleshapoids. Or Donna Kerness in anything.

Floraine Connors is one of the most compelling actresses ever put on-screen. I honestly used to think she was a guy in drag.

She’s in California?

One more—Francis Leibowitz, the heavyset woman that played your and Mike’s mom in Corruption of the Damned. That scene where she commits hara-kiri at the town dump is like Kurosawa directing Red Desert or something.

What happened to all these people when you moved to California in the 70s?

Do you prefer editing to shooting?

You improvise that much?

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Maybe it’s because the plots are so much about your own, uh…

Kenneth Anger believes that film collects more than just light and shadow. He said it made it hard to tell when they were finished.

I looked on IMDb, and apparently you’ve made 215 films. What kind of magic energy do you have?

Are the films you make in your production classes at the San Francisco Art Institute all improvised?

Give me an example.

Aren’t all your films diary films, then?

One of my favorite things in your old films is the special effects. There were two kinds: lightning storms and UFO invasions. You had an endless repertoire of ways to pull them off.

Jurassic Park

I think they’re scarier than digital effects. I’m also fascinated with your films about animals. The Mongreloid, the one about your dog, is hilarious.

Mongreloid

The hysterical and beautiful films of George Kuchar.    Click each column for enlargements.

You were involved in Curt McDowell’s notorious underground film Thundercrack!

Thundercrack!

laughs

It looks like everyone in it was tripping their tits off. Pretty wild time on the set?

McDowell was a student of yours when you started teaching at the Art Institute. How were you received there?

That’s pretty nice.

Do you like working with students?

MIKE KUCHAR

Vice: What were your early influences?

Mike Kuchar:

Who directed wasn’t such a big question at first?

I’m not so sure they do.

Critics label any Kuchar film outrageous and camp. It’s pretty offensive.

There’s something else going on there that pushes the same buttons as von Sternberg. They wouldn’t be so good if they were just camp.

No, all of that comes through. Even just the way you juxtapose shots. Do you work intuitively?

Once you got into color, the influence of watching all those Technicolor movies became obvious.

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Is your work more intuitive than George’s?

OK, are your movies as improvised as his?

Is it easier to work with actors this way than in the context of a more scripted film?

Were you a fan of your fellow underground filmmakers in the early 60s?

Yeah, I thought you might.

I used to buy Gay Heartthrobs comics. Those were hilarious. But it wasn’t until I was researching you that I realized you used to draw their covers.

Do you show this work?

They’re beautiful, horny, and really funny. A lot like your film work, actually.

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