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The Life and Cinema of the Kuchar Brothers

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Factory of Desire: The Low-Budget Ecstasy of the Class Films

George’s own filmmaking now took two distinct directions: the class films he supervised at S.A.I., and his own personal films.

The class films were cast and crewed with the students who took George’s course, many of whom had specifically enrolled at S.A.I. to study film with him, some coming from Europe and Latin America. These class films tested George’s resourcefulness since he was confronted on the first day with up to 30 students, each of whom had to be involved in some way, some speaking limited English.

Facing a linguistic gridlock that would give other instructors an ulcer, George leaned into it with gusto and actually sought out students with pidgin-English-speaking abilities for starring roles. "In those days," he recalls, "James Broughton was teaching at the school, and always complaining. He had a screenwriting course and he was always complaining that the class was full of foreigners who could barely talk English, much less write it. And I was always sayin’, ‘Well, send them to me!’, because I loved those accents — they gave the pictures a continental flavor. They had strange pronunciations of words and they made the screenplays come alive in weird ways."

class films poster The budgets were always small for these class films and George’s talent for spontaneous improvisation was constantly tested, distilling the productions down to the essence of low-budget filmmaking. He often wrote the dialogue and scripts on the spot, locked in a nearby closet so he could concentrate. Once, lacking dialogue for an actress, he told her to recite Shakespeare. She did. It worked.

George’s approach to directing a student cast was to create custom-tailored scenes and roles that would best exploit the multifaceted talents and looks before him, playing to individual strengths and enthusiasms, freeing the energy rather than subjugating it within the disciplined context of polished scripts, storyboarding, and rehearsals. It was all about chemistry cooked up among the actors themselves and among actors, scene, and setting. It was about spirits, energies, mixtures, and unplanned moments captured.

Instead of trying to compensate for lack of formal structure by coming to class overprepared as many a nervous director might, George turned unpreparedness into an art form and a modus operandi. "In being unprepared you are never sure of what you’re going to do and the sudden chance for discovery and inspiration becomes greater," he would write. If the productions that resulted bore no resemblance to classical Hollywood narrative film, they did move with a bracing energy and flamboyance. The pacing of the class films would always tend to be uptempo, but from the mid-’80s on they became even more fragmented and episodic as George adjusted to what he believed were the shorter attention spans of the MTV generation. We’s a Team (1989), for example, is a series of vignettes and rapidly executed skits.

Lack of funds also forced him into unheard of technical improvisations. Unhappy with one roll of film that had a kind of orange tint because he lacked the proper lens filter when it was shot, George gave it to a student who soaked it in a plate of bleach. George declared himself happy with the results: she’d fixed the color and also brought in unexpected flashes of lavender into the bargain. Another time, shooting outdoors in sunlight too bright for the film stock — even after cutting down on the aperture — they stuck sunglasses on the lens and it worked. "You could see the two lenses of the sunglasses," testifies George, "and we positioned each actor so that one would be in the right lens and one would be in the left lens, and they did their scenes. Everything else around them is bleached, but you can see them well enough through the glasses."

George Kuchar teaching a film class

The constant flow of new students assured that each film would have its own personality, though invariably stamped in the Kuchar mold. Some students would take more than one class and so "stars" would emerge over an "era" of several productions. Sometimes people not enrolled at S.A.I. would drop by and be cast in a film, and George would also cast faculty members, visiting artists, or people wandering by who looked right for a particular role.

The Desperate and the Deep (1975) opens with a striking credit sequence filmed through an aquarium. An enduringly popular film, this talkie drama at sea was designed and photographed in low-budget minimalist style, with everything taking place at night against black backgrounds. The effect of deckside ocean spray in people’s faces was supplied by a student off-camera throwing a dixie cup full of water.

Heated dialogue was needed to fuel these films as well as distract from the scaled-down sets and lack of professional effects. George was always more than equal to the task — sometimes crediting his script to a pseudonym when he deemed the dialog too florid.

One could always count on action in these class films, along with an unhinged exuberance, in contrast with George’s own usually more contemplative, mysterious, or atmospheric personal films. Brawls often erupted in the class films and George himself could occasionally be seen tumbling over cheap furniture and stage sets, as for example in Remember Tomorrow (1979).

Symphony for a Sinner (1979) was a long, lavishly photographed color film generally considered the magnum opus of the class productions. New York critic and coauthor of Midnight Movies J. Hoberman would rank it as one of the ten best films of the year, while Stan Brakhage would call it "the ultimate class picture." John Waters, who now visited George regularly whenever he passed through San Francisco, envied the lurid color photography and wanted George to shoot his next picture (which would have been Polyester and didn’t happen). Symphony, Waters said, had the look he craved for Desperate Living (1977).

Perhaps the real gem of George’s class filmmaking can be found in a forgotten film from the following year, How to Chose a Wife (sic), the concluding third of which features a bizarre wedding chapel scene complete with stumbling, heavily pregnant bride and mystified Arab onlookers. An apocalyptic earthquake erupts — the ground trembles and the chapel walls crumble and crash down in a hallmark scene of mass destruction. George recalls the budget at around $300. Everything was done with inventive camera effects and a keen sense of staging and scoring.

Mike also made a number of class films under the auspices of the San Francisco Art Institute during the ’70s: The Masque of Valhalla (1972), The Wings of Muru (1973), Blood Sucker (1975), The Passions: A Psycho-Drama (1977), Isle of the Sleeping Souls (1979), and in 1984, Circe.

George’s most sustained class film in a narrative sense is probably Summer of No Return (1988). A year and two films later George would start shooting the class films on video due to the rising cost of working in film and his shrinking budgets. It became impossible to conduct a class of 20 to 30 students all semester, all day Fridays, on a budget of $300. Jean Cocteau said that "the cinema will only become an art when its raw materials are as cheap as paper and pencil." Apparently Kodak wasn’t listening.

White Elephants on LSD: Personal Films and Collaborations

The fresh inspiration George found in San Francisco gave his own films a distinct personality from that point on, although his general style would be forever linked to his "Bronx hyper-reality" roots.

Completing The Sunshine Sisters in 1972, George began work on his Gone with the Wind — or what he terms his "white elephant": the 1973 black-and-white production of The Devil’s Cleavage. Consisting of a series of episodes totaling 21/2 hours, The Devil’s Cleavage was a recreation of ’40s and ’50s black-and-white melodramas that combines heartfelt hommage and deft parody. Curt McDowell excels in the male lead as the putz sheriff spouting bald Kucharian dialogue with a deadpan delivery.

In return for Curt’s help on this film, George assisted Curt on his 1975 feature Thundercrack! This would be their glorious gift to posterity — the world’s only underground porno horror movie. George titled and wrote the film, did the lighting, made up and costumed lead actress Marion Eaton, and acted the role of "Bing," the psychosexually troubled gorilla keeper who attempts suicide by crashing his circus truck in a thunderstorm. Rumor had it that George wrote the script during a thunderstorm in Nebraska while tripping on LSD. Actually he wrote the 192-page script during a prolonged stay at an Oklahoma YMCA where he used ballpoint pen to preclude erasures and the specter of eternal rewrites.

Thundercrack! George wrote the part of Bing, he recalls, "for someone a bit more aesthetic looking — in an Austin, Texas kind of way. I’m sort of bulky but they asked me to do it. Unfortunately I never had time to memorize my lines, which was a great source of embarrassment since I wrote the damn thing! But it seemed to give the character a little edge." To say the least. George’s performance is one of the most maniacal in the annals of the Underground, ranking alongside his role as Gianbeano in Sins of the Fleshapoids as his most twisted screen appearance.

Sparkles Tavern was Curt’s next feature film and would employ many of the actors from Thundercrack! McDowell wrote the script, George says, while high on LSD in Yosemite National Park. George was cast as "Mr. Pupik" — a mystical stranger with intuitive powers and Dadaist mannerisms who peddles bizarre but effective remedies for personal troubles. George was required to sing, execute arcane dance steps, and play the saxophone (actually the "air saxophone"). Shot in 1976, Sparkles was not edited and released until 1984. Three years later, on June 3, 1987, Curt McDowell died of AIDS at 42. (The original negatives of both Thundercrack! and Sparkles Tavern have since been lost or destroyed, apparently due to oversights by the Curt McDowell Foundation.)

California Abnormal: Invasion UFO

George’s 1979 film Blips would initiate a six-part UFO series inspired by UFOs he was spotting at the time. In a 1988 interview, he says, "In the mid-’70s I found out that UFOs are real. Whatever they are — I don’t know what they are. But there was a big rash of them and they were in California, in San Francisco. I happened to fall into the mess ... or mystery, by viewing what were UFOs. They were of different colors and they came in a series that lasted about a year and a half. Also in different sizes and shapes ... and they have strange mental effects on you. They interact with you in a personal way, although I can’t see how extraterrestrials would have that much interest in you. But from the stories you hear and my own personal experiences, it’s very personalized and bizarre. I began to investigate it in the films."

Set in several barren, debris-littered rooms, Blips plays as impressionistic soap opera, equal parts Phantom from Outer Space and Waiting for Godot. George was more concerned with portraying the psychic effects UFOs had on people, on their libidos particularly, than with the overworked science-fiction images of UFOS delivering mass destruction. Special effects were minimal.

The UFO sextet continued with The Nocturnal Immaculation (1980), Yolando (1981), Cattle Mutilations (1983), The X-People (1984), and Ascension of the Demonoids (1985), which is George’s last personal film to date.

George received his only funding grant for Ascension of the Demonoids ($20,000 from the NEA), and so, freed from the usual financial restraints, he was determined to have a good time and make a "spectacle" with "tons of color" and dazzling superimpositions and other camera effects. "I wanted to look away from the subject," George said in a 1988 interview, "so the movie looks away from the subject towards the end. In fact, it completely drops the subject, basically ... goes to Hawaii and examines the scenery, forgetting about what had previously happened or what the picture was about. That was my intention. I wanted to get off the subject."

George gave another inspired performance in the 1984 black-and-white feature Screamplay, an unjustly overlooked ode to silent movie making that featured some astonishing montage and superimposition. Cast against type by Boston-based writer-director Rufus Butler Seder, George plays a dour, reclusive superintendent of a courtyard motel with a convincing sense of menace — a persona in fact recognizable to anyone who has seen George sullenly loping down San Francisco’s Mission Street to the 19th Street flat where he lives today.

Mike and George Kuchar

These days Mike splits his time between San Francisco, where he shares the flat with George, and New York City, where he works in season at the Millennium Workshop. He periodically tours his films in Europe and the U.S. and works as cinematographer on independent Dutch and German films. In December 1993 he premiered his new video feature film, Purgatory Junction, at the Millennium to a full house. Mike has also given a name and enduring inspiration to the New York City underground-punk band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, fronted by nude body-painted singer Kembra Phafler and her guitar-playing Japanese husband.

George, with over 60 films and 100 videos now to his credit, has a higher profile. He was the subject of recent retrospectives at The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and at San Francisco’s palatial Castro Theater, which staged a joint George Kuchar/Curt McDowell retrospective in November 1993. George also continues to teach guest film courses and workshops at universities and film societies around the U.S., but seldom travels abroad. He works almost exclusively in video today.

Since the late ’70s, George has been a regular May visitor to an unremarkable little roadside motel in El Reno, Oklahoma. He’s become friends with the motel’s owner, who now picks him up at the airport. With each visit he produces a "Weather Diaries" video as he kills time in El Reno. He spends his time there filming daily life, clearing his head of psychic flotsam accumulated in San Francisco, and waits for tornados to strike.

The tornados, still ...

Has it ever happened?

"When one finally came," laughs confidante John Waters, "he ran and hid. I’m not sure — he might have been joking."

Jack Stevenson is an American film writer, print collector, curator, teacher, and distributor living in Denmark. In addition to his numerous articles on the byways of cinema for various international magazines, he is the author of Desperate Visions: The Films of John Waters and the Kuchar Brothers and editor of Pandemonium II: Cult Films, Killers, and Attempted Assassinations. His outré programming for various venues over the years — most recently "Post-War Noir Educationals" for San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — has won him widespread acclaim. He publishes The Living Color, an online film magazine of cult, kitsch, and camp.

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ALSO: More experimental and avant-garde cinema, director profiles, and a review of George Kuchar's Secrets of the Shadow World

ALSO BY JACK STEVENSON: The Wave Breaks: Star Danish Directors Fail to Translate and Lars von Trier: Pornographer?