Meet Mark Borchardt

2 comments September 4th, 2008

Over at the Onion AV Club, Scott Tobias continues his excellent series, “The New Cult Canon,” with one of my favorite films, the 1999 documentary AMERICAN MOVIE. Focusing on Mark Borchardt, a struggling Wisconsin filmmaker who’s working on a no-budget horror movie titled COVEN (pronounced COE-VEN, so it doesn’t rhyme with “oven). The movie is very funny, but I’ve always thought it was a lot more than just an amusing look at an oddball director, and Tobias agrees. Here’s how he sums up the film:

“But American Movie isn’t about filmmaking per se, it’s about the dreams and delusions of a man who comes from blue-collar stock, but refuses at his peril to fall in line with what’s expected of him.”

For all his goofiness — and there’s plenty of it, believe me — Borchardt is a genuinely inspirational figure in AMERICAN MOVIE. His film, COVEN, isn’t a cinema classic, but it is much better than you might expect having seen its creation, and parts of it show a genuine talent for setting up shots and finding the unnerving elements lurking just beneath the scene. But in a way, COVEN’s quality isn’t really what matters. It’s that Borchardt made it, period. That he did something with his life besides work menial jobs, hang out with his buddies and drink beer (though, if you’ve seen AMERICAN MOVIE, you know there’s a lot of that, too.)

Several years ago, Borchardt visited Rockford for a screening of AMERICAN MOVIE and COVEN at the now-defunct Storefront Cinema. I had a chance to go out for dinner (and drinks!) with him, and he’s exactly as he appears in the film — friendly, energetic, opinionated, quirky and truly one of a kind. Sitting there with him at the Olympic Tavern, as he asked the waitress to bring him a beer until the drinks arrived, or watching him waving a half-full can of Pabst around the theater during the question-and-answer segment, you could hardly believe this is a guy who’d made a film.

But, as AMERICAN MOVIE shows, that’s the whole point.