Monday, November 5, 2012

Johnny Gillete vs Nick Prueher


The Found Footage Festival, the acclaimed touring showcase of odd and hilarious found videos, will make its triumphant return to Raleigh in September with a brand-new show. Hosts Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, whose credits include The Onion and the Late Show with David Letterman, are excited to show off their 2012 lineup of found video clips and live comedy on Monday, September 10th at 8:30 p.m. at The Rialto (1620 Glenwood Ave.). Tickets are $11 and are available at the door or in advance at http://store.foundfootagefest.com/collections/fff-tour-tickets/products/sept-10-8-30pm-raleigh-nc-rialto



Johnny Gillete: Can you share just, very briefly—I don’t want to reveal any spoilers here, but can you share just a few quick highlights of the upcoming show?


Nick Prueher: We have a new exercise video montage. And the exercise videos are the most common types of tapes we find. I think this is probably the greatest one we’ve ever put together. This one has what I think of [as] a new category of exercise video. We’ve seen like scantily clad, sexually suggestive exercise videos, we’ve seen, of course, celebrity exercise videos, but we’ve never seen one where the host of the exercise video casually swears. A lot. Like f-words, “motherfuckers,” everything. Just sort of casually. And it’s this thing called The Thug Workout, and it’s put out by DMX’s rap label, for some reason. I didn’t know there was a crossover fitness video market, but yeah, so The Thug Workout is a really new one. Plus there’s like a workout for equestrians that we found and I don’t know, when you think you’ve seen every kind of exercise video, we find something that just completely blows our minds. There’s one called The Sexy Treadmill Workout, it’s neither sexy nor an actual workout, so it doesn’t deliver on either of the promises of the title. So, now, that’s just one montage. We open the show with a video that, you know—a lot of times you’ll watch a video and the reason it’s funny won’t hit you until after you’ve watched the whole thing. And that was the case with The Magical Rainbow Sponge. The title is why we picked it up, but crafting videos are always boring. We find a lot of how-to’s and crafting videos and they always suck. But this is the one exception we’ve found. Basically, the sponge is a regular sponge, but you put rainbow-colored ink on it and make squiggles and stuff, designs. And if that doesn’t get your readers salivating, I don’t know what will. The host of the video is this woman named Dee Gruenig and she is just psychotically enthusiastic about rainbow sponges and almost—not almost, she’s orgasmic about every little sponge design she’s making. So that sort of hit us after we’d watched the whole thing and we cut together just, in this hour-long video, her most excited yelps and exultations of joy at doing this sponging technique. So we open our show with that.





It's Exercise Awareness Week. Wear your AIDS ribbons. (Joe Pickett & Nick Prueher)


JG: So, you guys have been at this for quite some time now. I’m certain you’ve picked up quite a few tricks of the trade along the way. What’s different about your approach to comedy now as opposed to the infant stages of the Found Footage Festival?


NP: Well, I think one thing is we kind of go the extra mile now ‘cause we know there’s an audience. Before, when we were just doing it for ourselves, it was kind of a lark, but now we’ll go to great extremes. For this recent show, we hired a private investigator to track down somebody in the video, a guy we couldn’t find, Frank Pacholski, the mysterious masked dancer in front of elderly people from 1999. [We] tried the web searches, did everything we could, could not find Frank Pacholski. So we actually paid a private investigator to find him and within a day, he had an email address for us. And it turned out to be the right guy and it reached him.

So we reached Frank Pacholski and we had so many questions. I mean, this video, for readers who haven’t seen it, is fascinating for a number of reasons. But it’s this older, middle-aged, bald man who’s a very hirsute, hairy guy, and a little bit paunchy, and he’s there without any clothes except for an American flag Speedo. And he’s dancing to old, you know, Mozart songs and things like that, Johannes Mozart and Sousa marches. But that’s not the brilliant part. The brilliant part is that he’s assembled for his audience a group of elderly people, like one foot in the grave elderly people who clearly do not want to be there. And so he did two of these public access shows in 1999 and was never heard from again, and this private investigator found him for us. When we got a hold of him, we said, “We’re your biggest fans.” And he said, “If you want, you can come interview me.” He had very specific conditions, we had to meet him at the second lifeguard stand to the right of the Santa Monica pier. And we complied. We booked tickets to L.A., we spent about $1200 dollars to go meet him and we never would have done that in the infancy of the show.

JG: Right.

NP: And did it pay off? I don’t know. We’ll see when we play our interview with him in Raleigh. That is an exclusive interview you won’t see anywhere else. And why would you want to? So yeah, I think that’s the thing, we now have the resources and the wherewithal to really track people down and do some investigating and get to the bottom of the story behind these videos.



JG: I understand you guys have ambitions to do a traveling television show. What’s the latest news with that? 

NP: It looks like we’re gonna shoot two pilot episodes of this show for the Discovery Channel, for the Science Channel, I guess they’re part of Discovery. It is not the place I thought we’d end up for a TV show, but, you know, I guess VCRs are somewhat scientific. I don’t know. We might have to shoehorn a little science into the show. But yeah, I think they just really liked the concept. And there’s all these shows about weird occupations, you know, like crab fisherman and what is it, there’s one called American Pickers where it’s these two guys who travel around, rooting around in old barns for antiques and stuff. And you know, the big payoff for that is they found something worth thousands of dollars just collecting dust. I don’t think we’ll ever find a video that’s worth thousands of dollars, but we’ll find one that’s priceless to us. So, I think that’s the idea behind the show is that it’ll follow us around as we go looking at thrift stores for videos and meeting the people behind them. And the payoff will be playing the videos that we found before an audience. If you track somebody down, like Frank Pacholski, it’ll be having him perform, or—not perform, but come on stage with us and meet his adoring fans that he never knew he had. So that’s kind of the premise for the show and I don’t know, we’ll see how it goes. We’re always trepidatious with TV ‘cause we’ve had a few projects that have just not quite come to fruition. But it could be exciting. I hope people would watch it and be interested in it.

The most surprising thing about that whole process for us is in the beginning, you think, “Oh man, if we get a TV show where we’re the stars, we’re producing it, we got it made.” And then we signed a contract about how much we would make if everything goes through, and it’s probably less than we’d make when we’re on the road touring.

JG: Oh, really?

NP: For doing about a ton more work.

JG: Yeah, you’re really having to generate an enormous amount of content under those circumstances.

NP: Yeah. I guess that you don’t do it for the money, you do it to turn people on to the show and that kind of thing. So, anyway, it’s been sort of eye opening.



JG: Have you found that the traveling element of your comedy roadshow has been really helpful in picking up mega good time babes, the likes of which would rival the mega good time babes picked up by other acts like Poison, Dave Matthews Band, Hootie and the Blowfish?

NP: Yeah. I would say the groupies are amazing. I mean, they’re fat nerds, but they are an amazing bunch. And they put out. But they are guys. No, I feel like what we do is analogous to a touring band in that we’re on the road, we’re lugging our own gear, and all sorts of stuff. Except without any of the glamour of that or any of the coolness. It’s just a lot more nerdy and specific, but I don’t know. It’s fun.



JG: What lies ahead for you guys? Do you aspire to ever give a shot at standup or write more books or possibly make films or even learn another language, Korean, of course, being the first one that comes to mind?

NP: Well, the first I’d do when we get rich is I’m just gonna buy all the Rosetta Stones, for every language. So that’s the main ambition. But I don’t know, people ask that, “What’s the next thing for the Found Footage Festival?” Well, I say, “people,” like (laughs) nobody, nobody asks that. But interviewers sometimes do. And for me, it’s not a stepping stone to something else. The whole fun part about it is doing a show and tell, showing off our videos for people. So as long as we’re able to sustain doing that, I think we’ve succeeded. We just did Jimmy Kimmel for the first time and it’d be cool if we could that every three months or every four months and come on with new videos.

It’s like how Letterman has on Jack Hanna, the animal expert, every three months. Or like Marv Albert comes and shows the weird and wacky part of sports once a month or something. We could easily do that. I mean, we have enough material to supply a talk show with ten solid minutes of funny stuff every three months. Yeah, it’d be cool if we were able to do that and, you know, we have enough material for a new book, but I don’t know if anybody even buys books anymore.


Joe Pickett & Nick Prueher on Jimmy Kimmel Live

JG: Can you give our readers a little insight about your previous ongoing shenanigans with Kenny Strasser? I know you’ve included a bit about him in the upcoming show if I’m not mistaken.

NP: Well, (laughs) basically we do a lot of interviews on TV morning shows when we go to a new city to help promote the show. So we get up at 6:00 AM, we usually haven’t showered yet, and we get asked the same questions, usually from reporters who have no interest or understanding of what we do. And we always wonder whether it’s worth it, whether people come based on that, ‘cause I don’t know anybody who gets up at 6:00 AM. I don’t know, but we do them. To make it interesting for us, we decided to add a little bit of a challenge and we have something called the “two-word phrase challenge.” So, Joe, right before we go on air, will whisper a two-word phrase in my ear that I have to work in seamlessly during the interview. There’s been some pretty good ones. I think probably the most challenging one for me was the two-word phrase “basketball murderers.” And that one was in—there’s a Houston morning show and it was getting towards the end of the segment and I was like, how am I gonna work in “basketball murderers”? And the guy gave me just a little bit of a window of opportunity at the end. He said, “So, who are the types of people that make these videos?” And a little light bulb went off and I was like, “Ah. They could be psychopaths. They could be basketball murderers for all we know.” And then you just gotta keep talking. “So, you know and what we do is we investigate to try to find out who these people [are],” you know. The guy didn’t even bat an eye. That was probably the highlight, but then even that got boring for us. And so we decided the next thing to do was to actually get a fake person booked on these morning shows. It’s so easy to get booked. They are just looking to fill airtime, basically, in the mornings. So, we drafted a press release with a friend of ours, Mark, who had just been laid off from his job at a bank where he’d been working for 10 years. And nobody really knew this about him, but we, in college, would always put him up to saying and doing stupid things in public. It’s a gift. He could be a dumb guy with a straight face.

JG: It’s a lot more challenging than one might think.

NP: Sure. Yeah, I mean, Joe will put me up to saying and doing stupid things, and it’s a challenge for me. I do it, but it’s sometimes a challenge. Mark is just almost a prodigy or I don’t know, maybe just a sociopath. It’s an amazing skill. So, anyway, we drafted this press release and we thought, “What’s a for-sure booking? What morning show producer could say no to a segment that had a demo?” Something that you could demo on air. So we thought, “Well, yo-yos, that’s kind of an obnoxious thing. Let’s do a yo-yo expert.” So, we created this yo-yo expert called Kenny Strasser, who’s going around to public schools promoting environmentalism through yo-yoing. And that doesn’t make any sense when you think about it, but the reason we did that is because if you have a message, well, that’s even another reason for a morning show to book you. And then the final thing we figured they could never say no to is we said wherever town that we were gonna be in, we said that was his hometown. So we figured it was just a sure fire booking. And, sure enough, we sent out 10 press releases, 7 of them said, “Sure, we’d love to have him on.” So then we actually had to go through with it and Mark volunteered to be Kenny Strasser, the yo-yo expert. And [we] did a series of appearances in Wisconsin and then, once we got found out in Wisconsin, in Missouri, while we were on tour, and we’d be in the hotel, kind of rehearsing, and then we’d send him off in a stupid yo-yo outfit and watch in the hotel and be recording it on our computers. It was really fun. I mean, we just did it basically to entertain ourselves. There was no grand plan, but one of the news stations uploaded a video and it went viral. It had, like, a half million hits or something within days.

We started getting calls and emails and cancellations from other news stations. And we were pissed ‘cause we were like, well, somebody found us out and—not found us out, but we can’t keep having this fun anymore. But I guess the upshot of it is, another opportunity, is Mark is now a regular on The Office and he was in an unemployed banker living in Milwaukee before any of this happened. And now he’s, like, writing with Bob Odenkirk and all this stuff.

JG: Who are your guys’ big comedic influences both from back in the day when you were growing up and started to realize that you wanted to go into the comedy domain and who are the more recent stand ups, performers, or writers that have either had an influence on you or who you admire in some way, shape, or form?

NP: Well, I think Joe would agree with this, Red Skelton, number one. I think it’s obvious when you see the show. A little bit of Soupy Sales, but we’re mostly Red Skelton influenced. (laughs) I don’t know, I feel like we are nobody in the comedy world, so it’s weird to talk about influences. But, I mean, of course, like everybody else, Steve Martin was huge for me growing up. Just that sort of self-referential comedy that makes fun of comedy was just so revolutionary to me when I discovered him as a kid. And then David Letterman too. I used to stay up late and watch David Letterman, so he was a huge influence.

JG: And you had an opportunity to work on the Letterman Show, as well, right?

NP: Yeah. I worked there as a researcher, and then later, a segment producer for like four or five years. Four and a half years. After I graduated from college. And yeah, that was a huge honor to be part of that. And yeah, the guy’s a genius, no matter what you think of him now or whatever, he was just revolutionary and that’s why he’s the most respected guy on TV right now. So, yeah, he was a huge early influence. And then I remember when Mystery Science Theater 3000 came out, discovering that and being like, wait a minute, this is like a professional version of what my friends and I do, you know, every weekend. Sit around and watch horrible things and crack jokes about them. It was influential especially to what we do now, ‘cause it was the first thing where I was like, whoa, you can actually be a professional smartass. Like that’s a career track. Even though it wasn’t something that we directly thought of when we starting the Found Footage Festival, it’s easy to see now how influential that was for what we’re doing. I don’t know, contemporaries? I mean, we really like Neil Hamburger, [we’ve] actually toured with him a bit and gotten to know him.

And who else? Oh, Zach Galifianakis makes me laugh in just about anything he does. So I’d say those are two contemporary comedians. 

JG: I understand you’re a big Larry the Cable Guy fan too, right? 

NP: I love him. Love him. I keep on waiting for him to come out with a new catch phrase. Still waiting. I don’t know, maybe, “Got-R-Done”? “Making-R-Happen”? I don’t know. Just kind of spitballing here.



Making-R-Happen

JG: What’s the dumbest thing that’s ever happened to you while you’ve been on the road? 



NP: Hmm. Well, okay, one dumb thing was we got pulled over one time. We had flown into Minneapolis and then had to drive to northern Wisconsin from there, it was about an hour, hour and a half drive late at night, because the next day we had a show at a technical college at noon. So, we were up late, trying to keep ourselves awake on the drive, and the song “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones came on and Joe, who’s driving, decided to honk to the beat to—I don’t know why, just to be irritating to me or something. And this bored northern Wisconsin cop, straight outta central casting, pulls us over. And he had a huge dip of chew in his bottom lip and says, “You guys having fun there?” And we’re like, “Well, we’re just trying to keep ourselves awake here, you know.” And he says, “How much marijuana you been smoking tonight?” And we do not smoke marijuana, so I was like, “None. I’ve never done any drug in my life. I don’t even drink.” And he’s like, “All right. How much heroin do you got in the car?” As if that was gonna trip us up, “Bout a pound, I mean...” And, I don’t know, he must just have been looking for some big bust or something. So, he separated us and he had Joe go do a sobriety test and he took Joe’s driver’s license and ran it, you know. And Joe, at the time, had taken his driver’s license photo and had a neck brace on and a phony black eye. So he looks ridiculous in this driver’s license photo, he’s got a neck brace, black eye, and his hair is all crazy and he’s wearing a white tank top that has a blueberry pie stain on it. It looks ridiculous. So, the cops are looking at his I.D. and saying, “Haha. That’s a good one.” And Joe’s laughing about it. They think it’s funny. Well, I didn’t know this. I thought, here’s this guy, looking to make a bust, he already thinks we’re smartasses, and in my driver’s license, I got it taken where I’m wearing a priest collar. So, he talks to me separately while I’m sitting in the passenger seat, continuing to grill me about how many drugs we’ve got in the car. And so he looks at my license and he goes, “Is this for real?” So I have two choices. I could either tell him that, “No, I’m just mocking your religion.” And I thought, well, then he’s really gonna be pissed. Or I could say, “Yes, it’s real.” And you know, whatever. And for some reason, I decided that it would be better at the time to tell him that I actually was a priest. So he said, “Is that for real?” And I said, “Yep.” And he said, “You’re a priest?” And I said, “Well, not yet. I’m in seminary.” And he goes, “And so you just decided to wear your collar while you were getting your driver’s license photo taken?” And I’m like, “Yep. I was just on a break from seminary school.” And he’s like, “What church?” In my head, I was just thinking of the church that I went to growing up, and I said, “St. Mary’s.” And he goes, “All right. Wait in here.” And then it was just the longest complete grilling, and he must’ve just thought, who are these priests going to do a con—a priest and a guy who has a neck brace and a black eye traveling together on their way to a comedy show in northern Wisconsin at noon on a Tuesday. The story didn’t add up. So, that was probably the stupidest thing. He let us go, but he just completely monopolized our time and harassed us for about the better part of an hour.

JG: If FFF was a dog, what kind of a dog would it be?

NP: Uhhhh. Hmm. Really good question. Maybe like a basset hound ‘cause we’re sort of stubborn in our refusal to adapt to modern technology and we both have really long ears that drag on the ground.

JG: Do you have any real serious competition doing what you do? And, if so, do you ever fantasize about doing things to “eliminate” the competition, if you know what I’m talking about?

NP: (laughs) Oh yeah. Well, it’s weird ‘cause we started doing the show eight years ago, pre-YouTube, there wasn’t anything like it. But now there’s other people who do it. There’s like bloggers who started VHS blogs and they started their own live show. I even heard that someone at the Upright Citizens Brigade doing a show called The Found Footage Festival and they had taken two of our videos from our DVD and were showing that. 

JG: Holy shit.

NP: I emailed them and said, “Guys, you can’t really do that.” So, we’ll hear about someone who does a blog or like, “We saw this other show that was kind of like yours,” or whatever. And there’s other people like the Found magazine guys, who we did a tour with last fall, but they collect found notes and stuff. And there’s a band called the Trachtenburg Family Slide Show Players that find old slides at thrift stores of, like, people’s vacation slides and then write songs about them. So, the cool thing is that everybody kind of has their own twists on it, and I think there’s enough found videos and enough material out there for everybody, as long as they’re doing something unique. Like, there’s a website or blog that just kind of copies TV Carnage. TV Carnage is—he makes sort of mind-bending compilations of VHS material, like, feature-length and it’s pretty amazing. And these guys kinda seem like second-rate versions of that. I don’t know. We definitely, for doing essentially similar things—everybody has opinions about the other people—but I think most people we’ve met who are in the “found” game, we get along with fairly well. But if anybody encroaches on our territory too much, we will take steps to eliminate them.



Click for Amazon link

JG: (laughs) Has it been a burden on your friendship over the years to travel and live together for long, uncomfortable stretches, sharing hotel and motel rooms, smelling one another’s farts, eating road food, etc. Or has that emboldened and vivified your relationship? 

NP: There is no friendship anymore. I mean, we travel on separate buses. No, you know, that’s a pretty good question. I think Joe is the most irritating human being on the face of the earth. He would be proud of that honor. That’s something he aspires to. So I think what we’ve developed is a relationship where he tries to do everything he can to get under my skin. And I have to steel myself and ignore it because if I let him know it’s getting to me, it will only embolden him further. So, the more tired, you know, you’re on day 15 of a tour, and nobody’s slept, that’s when he’ll pounce. The relationship has developed in that I’ve developed an amazing tolerance to put up with irritating behavior. So, I think that he’s become more irritating and I’ve become more tolerant of his irritating behavior. So I guess if you want to call that strengthening of your relationship, sure. Yeah.

JG: How horny do you like to get at night? 

NP: I’d say, like 100. I mean, on a horniness scale? 100.

JG: Good. Lastly, what’s your least favorite question to be asked in a promo interview such as this? Also, what are some of the most frequent questions y’all get asked, especially by those people conducting local TV news and radio shows?

NP: Well, you know, I think this is a fair question, so it’s not annoying, but it’s, “So how did the FFF get started?” It’s only irritating insofar as everybody has to ask that question, but what makes it really irritating is when they say, “How did the Found Footage Film Festival get started?” I just had an interview on Friday that started off that way. And I was like, “Oh boy. This is gonna be a long one.” They clearly have not paid any attention to even the title of the show, so I just know at that point, it’s going to be a tough slog. So, you know, she’s like, “So tell me about this Found Footage Film Festival. Sounds fun.” You’re just like, “Oh Jesus.” So, yeah, that’s one. What’s another irritating question that we get? This is gonna sound ungrateful, ‘cause we certainly appreciate any attention that the festival gets, “How have you two perfected what you do?” That’s a question that we get a lot. I still don’t know if there’s any good answer to that, but I suppose that’s a fair question. 

JG: That leads me to my next question. How have you two perfected what you do?

NP: Oh, good question. 

JG: Finally, could you tell me about your plans to move to Raleigh, North Carolina and just, if you could, include a general timeframe so we know exactly when to expect you?

NP: Joe and I have a nice farmhouse picked out and just a large place for kids and everything and we just kind of found a nice little area, we’re gonna start building in October.

JG: Nice. Well, we’re really looking forward to having you down here and to enjoy your comedic stylings on a more frequent basis.

NP: We’re just excited about the cigarettes.





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