Tony I were traveling over the holidays in 2015, so I was not able to have an appropriate screening of NUT CRACKER N25. Jerry Nunn had a house party screening, but beyond that it only turned up online. As we got into 2017, Uncle Alice approached me about doing a screening at Martyr’s in Chicago. I liked the idea; we hadn’t done a screening in a long time, and Martyr’s is a terrific location. Of course me being me, I didn’t want to simply pop into town and show a 25 minute video. If our friends, family and fans (I hate using that word, but there are people who seem to like our work so I’ll call them that for lack of a better term) were going to gather, I wanted to give them a show. So I set about putting together a career-spanning retrospect of all of our projects to date. I wanted to present it like an old 50’s instructional film, so I decided to title the evening WHAT IS UNDERGROUND FILM?

Obviously it was never going to cover everything that was underground film. It was just intended as a showcase for our campy projects, culminating in the big premiere of N25. I knew how I wanted it to look, but writing out a script talking about myself in third person was more challenging than I thought. Tony volunteered to write it… it is a little different tone than my own stuff, but goes well with what we had to show. I asked our friend Amanda Cohen, whom we have known for decades but who has never been in one of my projects, to star in all of the wraparound footage as “Dr.” Glenda Gershenson, the expert on Underground Film.

It’s admittedly a little long (just over two hours), but we squeezed some full length shorts in there, the music videos, lots of clips from the other films, and stuff that nobody has ever seen (like my high school animation project Swan Song). And Amanda did a fantastic job of keeping it light and keeping it moving. I guess as a stand-up comedian, she is able to do that handily and make it seem effortless.

We had a great screening with so many people who have participated over the years in attendance. It was an extremely special night in my life, and well worth the visit to my hometown.

2017, color & BW, HD video, 123 min.

Click on thumbnails below to start slideshow of images from the retrospect