Return of the Found Footage Festival

ALL I can say is, it's one of the funniest things I have ever seen. The Found Footage Festival, a collection of oddball training videos, celebrity promotions and home movies, rolls though Los Angeles every year or so, curated and presented by two Letterman-like dudes who scour thrift stores and garage sales.


One of host Nick Prueher's favorite videos from this year's festival, on Tuesday (March 1) at Largo at the Coronet, is something put together by Linda Blair called How to Get.... Revenge!


“The tips she’s offering are far too real to be anything but genuine,” Prueher says of the Exorcist star. “And some of them are illegal – like putting a hose through somebody’s mail slot. Some of them are federal offenses. We didn’t know where to categorize that one.”


HERE is my piece from the new LA Weekly.


Prueher speaks quite lovingly of VHS -- like a vinyl junky, he loves the low-fi imperfections of his medium -- and considers the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s the Golden Age. In the early '90s, movies started to be priced for sale to consumers and not just video stores and libraries, and after a few years they began to push out the stranger stuff.


"That was a loss if innocence," he says. "It cluttered video stores with endless copies of Jerry Maguire that are of no use to us."

Here's the kind of thing they go looking for.


Oh -- and legendary doc Heavy Metal Parking Lot will open the show. I grew up in Maryland in the '80s, so this verite' shot outside a 1986 Judas Priest concert at the Cap Center has a special meaning to me. Don't miss it.