November 5, 1999 | At a time when the freakish success of The Blair Witch Project may encourage even more would-be filmmakers to borrow funding from friends and max out their credit cards, Chris Smith’s American Movie provides an invaluable service by placing that success in its proper context. This sometimes amusing, sometimes unsettling documentary forces us to consider the other 99.9 percent of indie productions by neophyte auteurs. It is not a pretty picture.
Mark Borchardt, a gangly and goateed fellow in his early 30s, is the “hero” of the piece. During his teenage years in a working-class Milwaukee suburb, Borchardt drew inspiration from his favorite horror flicks – most notably, Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – while filming gruesome Super-8 shorts with friends and relatives. American Movie includes snippets of these early, out-of-focus efforts – I Blow Up and The More, The Scarier are typical titles – to illustrate Borchardt’s youthful zeal. More than a decade and a half later, he remains every bit as enthusiastic about filmmaking. Trouble is, there are few signs that he has gotten appreciably better at his craft.
American Movie introduces Borchardt as a motor-mouth under-achiever who supports himself by delivering newspapers and doing maintenance work at a local cemetery. For the past six years, he has worked intermittently on Northwestern, an autobiographical black-and-white drama about drinking too much and accomplishing too little in Milwaukee. But he remains too deep in debt to finish this ambitious project. (At least, that’s the excuse he offers in an on-camera interview.) So Borchardt resumes work on another uncompleted film: Coven, a supernatural horror thriller about an alcoholic writer who runs afoul of a demonic cult.
Coven – which, for reasons never entirely clear, Borchardt insists on mispronouncing as “KO-ven” – is intended as a self-distributed, direct-to-video moneymaker. If he can sell 3,000 copies at $14.95 each, Borchardt explains, he can make a profit for his investors and raise enough money to finish Northwestern. If – and this is an even bigger if – he can ever finish Coven.
Borchardt comes across as almost frightfully dedicated, if not borderline crazy, while pursuing his goals. His loving but dubious father won’t lend him any more money, and even his two brothers question whether Borchardt should consider getting a “real” job. (“What he’s best suited for, I think,” says one sibling, “is work in a factory.”) But Borchardt refuses to be sidetracked. In a sequence that is at once screamingly funny and profoundly creepy, the wanna-be filmmaker lures his near-senile Uncle Bill into investing a few thousand by showing the old guy a photo of a sexy young actress. “She wants to be in your movie, Bill,” Borchardt claims. Very soon, Coven has a brand-new executive producer.
American Movie follows Borchardt for more than a year as Coven proceeds along its on-again, off-again production schedule. Mike Schank, the filmmaker’s long-time friend and collaborator, is a recovering drug and alcohol abuser who sounds chronically dazed and confused. Even so, Schank – who has a tendency to end every statement with a nervous titter – is the most reliable member of Borchardt’s production team. Sometimes, extras simply don’t show up for key scenes, forcing the director to make do with a smaller number of bogeymen in black hooded capes. (“Now you guys gotta look menacing!”) At other times, Borchardt must enlist his Swedish-born mother, or a cast member – or somebody, anybody – to operate the camera. (“You’ve seen a lot of movies, haven’t you? So you basically know how to frame a shot, right?”) There is retake after retake of a scene in which Borchardt – who, of course, serves as his own star – smashes a friend’s head through a kitchen cabinet door. The friend is game, but the cabinet refuses to co-operate.
At the center of this comedy of errors, Borchardt remains a fascinatingly complex and often unlikable figure. He sounds peevish and condescending as he talks about the benighted folks who earn decent salaries and live in “sterile” houses while he suffers for his art. And he sounds pathetically self-deluding when he cites Ingmar Bergman as one of his major influences: “You ever see The Seventh Seal, where they have those great dialogues in those great backgrounds? Well, that’s what I want to do here.”
And yet, in the end, you can’t help sharing Borchardt’s exultant sense of accomplishment when he actually completes and premieres his 35-minute Coven. Mind you, judging from what we see of the film, it likely wasn’t worth all the trouble. But, then again, you can view the finished product and decide for yourself. If you log onto americanmovie.com, you can order your very own copy of Coven. No kidding.
