LAKEVIEW — When Nick Prueher was a teenager working at a McDonald's in Wisconsin, he found an old training video for janitors in the break room that turned out to be the genesis of the Found Footage Festival.
"It was called 'Inside and Outside Custodial Duties,' and it was so remarkably dumb," Prueher said with a laugh. "It was like, this crew trainer was really perky and training this dopey trainee, and I was like, 'This cannot stay in the break room. This needs to be seen by the world.'"
So Prueher snuck it home in his backpack and showed it to his buddy Joe Pickett that night. Soon it became a tradition to watch the video with a group of friends at Prueher's parents' house every Friday night.
"We’d watch this McDonalds training video over and over and make a running commentary of jokes about it," Prueher said. "That was 1991, and we started thinking, 'What else is out there?' So we just started looking in thrift stores and garage sales and other out-of-the way places, and the collection just kept growing and growing.”
In 2004, Prueher and Pickett started the Found Footage Festival, a touring festival that features VHS tapes the pair have found in garage sales, thrift stores, warehouses, garbage cans and other forgotten places. The goal is to find videos that are unintentionally hilarious, and the two curators provide context and a running commentary as the videos play.
The festival returns to the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Friday. Tickets are $15 and can be bought online.
This year, the festival features a slew of gems, including outtakes and on-air bloopers from more than 10 years of North Dakota local news, exclusive selections from David Letterman's VHS collection (donated to the Found Footage Festival when Letterman retired) and a collection of "satanic panic" videos from the 1980s.
Dark Lord Blood, the featured guest on a local New York talk show, terrifies people during the height of "satanic panic" in the 1980s. This video will be included in this year's Found Footage Festival, which comes to the Music Box Theatre at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Friday. [Provided/Found Footage Festival]
"We found a lot of 'satanic panic' videos from the '80s, when everybody thought Satan was coming for their children," Prueher said. "There were all these videos about how Dungeons and Dragons is evil and how to look for signs your child is becoming a satanist. We put that in context for people, and over the videos we offer a running commentary of observations and jokes."
Prueher said the festival is on tour for about 130 days out of the year, and he and Pickett are always on the look-out for new videos to add to their collection. For example, when they arrive in Chicago Friday morning, they'll hit up as many thrift stores as they can. They usually check a couple boxes of VHS tapes when they're ready to fly back to their New York offices.
"I would say we have maybe a 1 percent success rate," Prueher said of the hunt for festival-worthy VHS tapes. "We have to watch 100 tapes before we find one that's good."
Prueher said they don't know what a good tape is until they watch it, but a general rule of thumb is that the video has to be funny on accident.
"Usually, the more sincere the video was trying to be, the better," he said. "If some corporation wrote a rap, that's always a good sign. If there's a C-list celebrity on any video, we'll always buy it."
While it can be difficult to describe in words the type of humor the Found Footage Festival offers, Prueher said most people who attend get it when they see it. He's seen some people walk out, but at the end of the day, the festival offers a type of communal comedy that people don't often get to experience, and most audiences seem to appreciate that.
"You can certainly see funny videos on the internet, but to us the proper context is in a dark room on a huge screen with 300 other people," he said. "Those are the ideal viewing conditions for McDonald's training videos."
Some examples from the Found Footage Festival web site:
