Twenty Three Years After the Release of American Movie I Find Myself Relating to Mark Borchardt on a Painful Level

illustration by Felipe Sobreiro from The Fractured Mirror book.

My Dumb Quarter Century is a series of twenty-five essays on important art and entertainment from pop culture writer Nathan Rabin’s twenty five years as a pop culture writer. Previous entries explored 1997’s Rock, Rot & Rule and 1998’s Now THAT’s What I Call Music, Volume One.

Chris Smith pursued a number of modest, winning projects following the breakout success of 1999’s American Movie, which he co-directed with Sarah Price, but over the past half decade or so he has quietly established himself as the casual King of zeitgeist-capturing Netflix docs about eccentric, unforgettable creators whose ferocious need to create something new and unique that reflects them in all of their madness and glory leads them to surreal and hilarious extremes. 

First came 2017’s Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, a documentary about the making of the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon. It was an exploration of method acting and Jim Carrey’s bifurcated identity as both a great artist/spiritual seeker and pompous narcissist who needs to get over himself. 

Two years later Smith again hit gold and got nominated for more Emmys when he directed the less ostentatious and infinitely more satisfying documentary about the historic, world-class shit show that was the Fyre Festival. 

The unassuming Midwesterner’s already thriving career rocketed into a whole new stratosphere when he turned his camera on another raging hurricane of creativity and unfortunate fashion/follicular choices intent on doing anything to make it in show business named Joe Exotic and distracted us all from our misery and dread during the early days of the pandemic. 

The hits kept coming! This year he once again went viral with the mega-popular Netflix docuseries Bad Vegan about a charismatic vegetarian restauranteur whose life goes haywire when she falls under the sway of a con man. 

American Movie co-directors Sarah Price and Chris Smith

Smith has spent the last five years in the white-hot epicenter of pop culture. It’s probably not an exaggeration to state that at this point Smith’s productions have probably made Netflix a billion dollars. 

In some ways Smith has gone a very long way since he was a scrappy, independent Milwaukee filmmaker who found the documentary subject of a lifetime that, again, also prominently involves Jim Carrey, Joe Exotic, Billy McFarland, Ja Rule and the Bad Vegan and made an instant classic that remains one of the best and most beloved movies ever made about the filmmaking process, documentary or narrative. 

In another sense, Smith’s professional hot streak is an extension of American Movie that finds the documentarian revisiting very similar subject matter over and over again. 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of American Movie in my life. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to write a book about American movies about American movies and what I wanted it to include documentaries as well as narrative films. The world of American Movie is my world. I grew up outside of Milwaukee and went to college at Madison Area Technical College and then the University of Wisconsin at Madison, graduating with a degree in Communication Arts with a concentration in Radio, Television and Film the same year American Movie was released to critical acclaim and instant cult glory. 

I was part of the Wisconsin film community when American Movie came out. I even had dinner with Smith and some professional colleagues because he was a fan of The A.V. Club as well as The Onion and was struck by how unassuming he seemed. 

I grew up with people who talked like Mark Borchardt talked, or rather had the same intense Milwaukee accent because part of the beauty of American Movie is that nobody talks like Mark Borchardt talks. 

I know the sour Milwaukee sadness of American Movie deep in my bones and in my soul. It occupies the same soothingly familiar realm of homemade working-class Midwestern gothic as Insane Clown Posse and The Gathering of the Juggalos. 

Borchardt rivals Robert Evans for his propensity for accidental poetry, sideways lyricism and unforgettable turns of phrase. Throughout American Movie I kept jotting down Borchardtisms I didn’t just want to quote reverently: I wanted them tattooed on my skin or inscribed on my headstone, like when he complains, “That’s some corny dialogue that would make the pope weep” or casually mentions, with a completely straight face, that his version of Christianity differs from most in that it’s half-Satanic. 

Being equally Christian and Satanic might seem like an unresolvable contradiction to everyone else, but to Mark Borchardt it makes sense. 

American Movie argues that its subject has a raw but very real gift for crafting memorable images and striking compositions but his real gift is being Mark Borchardt. In that, he is a goddamn intuitive genius, a natural. There is an art to being a great documentary subject. Borchardt mastered it.

Smith’s melancholy masterpiece begins with the words, “I was a failure”, a forthright admission of defeat softened somewhat by the past tense. 

Borchardt thinks of himself as a failure because he let his vices and the bullshit of everyday life keep him from what he sees as his life’s purpose: making a deeply personal, autobiographical independent feature film called Northwestern. 

This is one of those still silent images you can hear.

The filmmaker is still a relatively young man at thirty but he has nevertheless lived long enough to make a fantastic mess of his life. He dropped out of high school, got married and divorced, and now has three children he can’t begin to begin to afford with his day job cleaning up at a cemetery. He’s drowning in credit card debt and has a serious drinking problem as well as a disapproving brother who expresses surprise that Mark did not end up a serial killer since he loves thinking about death and murder so much.  

Re-watching American Movie as a struggling forty-six year old independent small businessman whose livelihood is largely dependent on people giving me money through Patreon to keep this modest little lemonade stand of a website in business or buying signed copies of my self-published books directly from me rather than, you know, buying one of the many non-self-published books available from Amazon, I felt like I was looking in a funhouse mirror. 

Like Borchardt during his opening monologue, I’m similarly wracked by a gut feeling that time for me to succeed in the exceedingly difficult business of entertainment is running out. I’m in a much different place than he is but I’m also forever haunted by the specter of failure.

I’m worried that I too am on the verge having to concede that despite my furious exertions I’m just not going to make it, that I’ll soon find myself in a place where I can no longer live my dream making a living doing what I love for an appreciative, indulgent audience.

American Movie is a very funny movie. It’s so funny that it legitimately poses a problem for all mockumentaries about filmmaking because it doesn’t matter how good they are, they’re never going to have characters as brilliantly realized as Mark Borchardt, his sidekick Mike Schank and his dry-witted uncle Bill. And they’re not going to have laughs as huge or as consistent as this documentary. 

But it’s also deeply sad, even heartbreaking. It’s about death and failure and sadness and rejection and poverty and alcoholism and dysfunction and divorce and a form of madness and sadness unique to Wisconsin. 

Borchardt makes for a profoundly flawed protagonist. His rough edges have rough edges. He’s the kind of guy who drunkenly proposes that Schank, a best friend whose greatest and proudest achievement is his hard won sobriety, spend twenty bucks he’s come into on four pitchers of beer. 

The filmmaker is impossibly demanding with collaborators who have sacrificed their time and energy and sanity for no money yet he has a way of sucking grown-ups who should know better into his dreams. 

American Movie is a product of the 1990s independent film boom, when self-taught filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez became rock stars of film and deluded generations of scruffy wannabes into thinking that anyone with a flamboyant personality, good idea and strong will could make it it in the picture business. Who has a bigger personality or stronger will than Borchardt? if that was all it took to be a successful filmmaker, Borchardt would be at a Christopher Nolan. Unfortunately for Borchardt, it takes a whole lot more than that to succeed as a filmmaker.

Even a project as modest as Northwestern requires a fair amount of management and organization, two areas where Borchardt falls short. Failure is written into American Movie’s DNA. It is ostensibly the story of the making of the feature film Northwestern but Borchardt’s endlessly delayed labor of love never comes close to getting made. 

Borchardt is deeply depressed and his “solution” to the problem of raising money for Northwestern involves convincing a public that has historically shown zero interest in buying short films from non-established filmmakers and self-released films to pluck down fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents to buy Coven, a micro-budgeted short film from a complete unknown.

I bought a signed copy of Coven at the time of its release, as did many of my friends, because I wanted Borchardt to succeed. I wanted him to realize his dreams. By buying a videocassette from Borchardt, I could be part of the documentary, a minuscule component of its happy ending.

Borchardt isn’t just willing to suffer physically for his art; he’s disconcertingly eager to put his body, and the bodies of his collaborators, through hell. American Movie mines a juicy vein of dark physical comedy from Borchardt punishing himself in order to get Coven made by any means necessary, even if his mom has to work the camera.

In one of the many moments in the film that hit close to home, Borchardt concedes that Northwestern has all of the potential in the world as a movie that he’s trying to make, and dreams of making, but once it’s finished all of that promise dissipates and it becomes a concrete, real piece of product that could very well suck. 

Borchardt loses the fight to keep Northwestern in production fairly early in the documentary. At that point American Movie stops being the story of an ambitious personal feature that was not made and becomes the story of Coven, a short film that was made and consequently exists for posterity as an illustration of its writer-director-star’s very real gifts as a horror filmmaker. 

Mark is fortunate to have, in sidekick/best friend/collaborator Mike Schank, someone with the patience, selflessness and inner peace of Christ in addition to Buddha’s physique. To say that Schank has been through some shit would be a colossal understatement. 

When Schank says that it’s amazing that someone who abused his body and mind the way he has is still alive, you believe him. When he says that he has LOTS of crazy stories from his drug days and Borchardt can’t hide his disinterest it reminded me of the many times in Barton Fink when John Goodman’s affable serial killer says that he’s got great stories and Barton Fink similarly couldn’t care less despite ostensibly devoting his life to telling the stories of the oft overlooked common man. 

While Borchardt spends the entirety of American Movie talking a big game about what he’s going to do as a filmmaker, Schank is obviously a very talented guitarist yet he never calls attention to his extraordinary ability. He plays because it makes him happy and because it’s what he was put on earth to do, not because he expects any external rewards. 

Borchardt and Schank look like a comedy team. Think Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy or Jay and Silent Bob. Borchardt is tall and skinny, a powder keg of manic energy forever yammering on about something. Schank is an oasis of Zen stillness, a quiet man who has learned to value the simple things in life. 

Every time I watch American Movie I pick up something new. It didn’t register until now, for example, that American Movie is the heartwarming story of a profoundly good man winning his life or death battle with alcoholism and drug addiction but struggling mightily to control his compulsion to buy scratch off lottery tickets. 

As Schank reflects in a moment of clarity, if you’re addicted to drugs and alcohol and you give into that addiction you always lose. But if you’re addicted to scratch off lottery tickets, MOST of the time you’ll lose. But SOMETIMES you win and while Schank is willing to give up the highs and lows that come with drug and alcohol addiction, he’s clearly not ready to lose that feeling of exhilaration, as empty as it might be. 

When you suffer the way that Borchardt and Schank suffer, you need something to get you through the misery of everyday existence, whether that’s the possibility that an instant lottery ticket might hit big or the chance, small as it may be, that you’ll beat the odds and become a Hollywood success story, even if you live and work in Milwaukee. 

Borchardt’s other inspired comic foil in American Movie is his Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill has the curt, pessimistic air of an old man who is waiting around to die, and is frustrated that the process is taking so long. 

Uncle Bill has somehow acquired a personal fortune of nearly three hundred thousand dollars that Mark is understandably eager to use to fund his movie-making dreams. So he kisses up shamelessly to the old man and plays to his ego and his libido, in part by really highlighting that one of the great joys and pleasures of working in film involves the presence of attractive women. 

Uncle Bill never is far from sold on his nephew’s vision but that does not keep him from putting his money behind it all the same. Even the crankiest of curmudgeons can’t help but get lost in Borchardt’s feverish fantasies. 

As of this writing Borchardt never got around to finishing Northwestern. That might be for the best. It can live forever as Borchardt’s would-be masterpiece. 

In the decades since American Movie’s release, Borchardt has enjoyed modest but deeply satisfying fame as an independent movie icon, as the living personification of the human need to create regardless of the circumstances. The same is true of Schank. They are Milwaukee celebrities, local guys made good, the stars of a movie that only gets deeper and more resonant with time. Today American Movie feels as inextricably woven into the fabric of American history and American pop culture as Maysles Brothers masterpieces like Salesman and Grey Gardens.

There’s something beautiful and pure about that. Watching American Movie felt like going home the same way that attending the Blues Brothers Con in Joliet, Illinois did. And if the experience is bittersweet and melancholy and more than a little painful as well as hilarious and entertaining, that’s true my experience living, loving and suffering in Wisconsin as well. 

Wanna read a book full of pieces like this, but decidedly shorter? Of COURSE you do! Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films, illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

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