Street sat down with Nick Prueher, co-creator of the funny and bizarre Found Footage Festival, to discuss the roots of his underground tribute to the now ancient VHS tape. Along with his co-presenter Joe Pickett, Prueher will be putting on the Found Footage Festival this Sunday, November 15 at 7 and 9 p.m. at Connie’s Ric-Rac in South Philly.
Street: Where did the idea for the Found Footage Festival come from, and how did you two end up working together? Nick Prueher: When I was in high school, I was working at McDonald’s and found a training video in the break room for McDonald’s custodians. It was called Inside and Outside Custodial Duties. I popped it in the break room, and I couldn’t believe how dumb it was, how remarkably insulting this video was. That’s essentially what we’re doing now except in movie theaters with a lot more footage. After we found the McDonald’s video, we just thought, “God, there’s got to be more ridiculous footage out there just waiting to be discovered.”
Street: Is there any clip, any joke that you find crosses “the line?” Do you have a line? NP: It’s a very loose line. One thing that we’ve featured in our show — at first by accident but now intentionally — is full frontal male nudity. For whatever reason, it always gets laughs and horrifies people so we really enjoy including that in every show. But really, the only thing for us is that it has to be funny. If it’s not funny or just gross or disturbing, then we won’t include it.
Street: Where do you see the Found Footage Festival going in the future? Do you think that it has long-lasting, mainstream appeal? NP: I think it does. We’re finding more VHS tapes than we’ve ever found before. As we’ve toured with the show, more and more people have donated videos to our project, which is a cool thing that we never anticipated. I don’t know where the project will end up going, but I think that we’re going to be doing this for a long time. As long as people have bad ideas and access to video equipment, we’re in no danger of running out of material.
Street: How has the project evolved, and have you found that your original concept has drastically changed? NP: You know, it’s still just two dudes showing off their video collection. That’s really the meat and potatoes of what the show is. We used to just slap the videos together in an entertaining way and explain where the videos came from. We still do that, but we focus a lot more on the comedy part of it now. We’ve tried to expand it that way and make it more of a comedy show instead of just a simple screening.
