Filmmaker Don Hardy. Photo: Don Hardy.

Filmmaker Don Hardy. Photo: Don Hardy.

We were so fortunate. This guy named Skip Elsheimer, a fan of The Residents from North Carolina, just sent me an e-mail that said, “I do footage transfer for a lot of archival footage and I’d love to help out if I can.” He really became our godsend. He had virtually every format there to make it all work. He did an amazing job transferring it to HD. And down the road, we’re going to transfer it to 4K, so that should preserve it for the foreseeable future.

Even tracking down the best copies of this stuff was a challenge. A couple of them had been donated to the Museum of Modern Art. Some of them were at the Berkeley Film Archives. It became somewhat of a detective mission. I involved Graeme Whifler because he’s the guy that shot a lot of this stuff. I basically asked him, “What’s the best process here? I’m from the video generation. I don’t know film that well, especially stuff like the process for transferring 50mm film.” So I had to lean on a lot of people for help.

For the folks who had only ever seen the classic films [for songs] like “Hello Skinny” or the “One-Minute Movies” on some crappy VHS copy, seeing them on the big screen is going to blow you away. The quality is a great source of pride for us.

GALO: Was preservation a goal from the beginning?

DH: I would have loved to find [the footage] already perfect, but that wasn’t the case. [Preservation] became very important right off the bat. They’ve just produced such an amazing amount of work.

Bart [Barton John Bishoff], Josh, and I — it was basically the three of us that put this sucker together — we just felt that only a real movie [fit the material]. Then we had to figure out how to pay for it. That’s when we started our crowdfunding campaign. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Our Indiegogo donors are really what allowed us to do this. Up to that point, we’d put the whole film on our credit cards. When we realized we had to do all this transfer, it became more daunting, so we started the campaign for funding. We had some pretty cool [crowdfunding] perks we developed with the Cryptic Corporation that we thought would really appeal to fans. It went over great. We ended up making more than double what we asked for, which pushed us to do the transfers, finish the film, do the color and sound mixing, and everything to get it ready for SXSW. It’s amazing how people turned out to support us.

GALO: You mentioned the Museum of Modern Art, a place where The Residents’ work is now stored in a giant refrigerator. What do you think about the band’s placement in a museum setting? Would you like to see the fridge on display someday?

DH: I would love to see that fridge on display. I’m fairly new to the world [of The Residents], but Homer Flynn has been with The Residents since the beginning. I’ve gotten to know him pretty well over the course of the film. Being there with him on the day they put it in was such an honor. I knew how much it meant to him to see this in [MoMA] beside these amazing works of art. At a meeting afterward, we were talking about how it would actually be displayed.

It’s kind of hard to put it into words. There’s this big refrigerator full of 40 years’ worth of art, something so commercial, and then these very smart people from the MoMA are debating exactly how it should be displayed. It was so cool.

I think we finally decided on having it displayed doors open so you can walk around it 360 degrees. Then figuring out a way — and this is what they [at MoMA] do — to turn it on, so the lights inside can illuminate the contents without having the refrigeration part going.

When all the paperwork was being signed for the museum to take possession of it, there was another idea. In the contract language it says, “Can be used for different exhibitions in New York or elsewhere.” When we eventually do a screening in New York, we hope to have [the fridge] on display, so that everyone who comes to see the film can also see the “ultimate box set.” It’s quite impressive to see in person. There’s just a lot of work and creativity in that box.

GALO: Switching gears now, most documentaries are acts of collage in order to tell a balanced story or approach a difficult topic. How does collage function in this film, where you have a mysterious subject that resists investigation? What new meaning does the form take on?

DH: That’s a great question. It was a tough film to get my arms around in a lot of ways. We started on it very quickly without a lot of prep time or time to figure out what the story was. They were starting off on their 40th anniversary tour, so we were like, “Let’s just go.” There was a lot of trust there immediately. Here are these guys [The Residents] don’t know, pointing cameras at them. They had to assume we weren’t going to post the footage to YouTube immediately with titles like, “The Residents Revealed.”

We would film the shows, and then we would hang out on the bus. I started jotting down notes on who might be the right people to talk to in order to paint this portrait of The Residents, because the band doesn’t give interviews. A few people were obvious, people they had collaborated with for a long time. But mostly, we had to track down a lot of different people in order to paint a portrait of who they are together.

That’s where the collage idea really came in. Think about it: you’re trying to do a documentary where you can’t talk to the central people. All these different people began to make up the landscape of it. I think, ultimately, it relates to one of the larger ideas — that I hope comes across in the film — that The Residents isn’t about four people. I think in the film Hardy Fox from the Cryptic Corporation says that people are pre-glued into this “Beatles concept” that it’s four guys: guitar, bass, drums, singer, and that’s the band. Well, with The Residents, that’s absolutely not the case. It’s always been a rotating lineup. Sometimes it’s been 12 people, sometimes three people. Throughout the film, you meet people that have played different roles. If you stick with it all the way through the film, there’s a very last sort of surprise soundbite at the end that says, “You’ve just seen The Residents. You’ve seen all of them.” Whether you want to look at it that way or not is up to you, but we certainly do. It’s a collective effort that makes The Residents special.

GALO: Elsewhere you’ve said you were tempted to leave your name off the film as a nod to this creative, collective mentality, as if to say, “This film is by The Residents.” Beyond the ultimate implications that forced you to reconsider, do you believe the film will be remembered as part of the band’s body of work or will it have a life of its own?

DH: I don’t know. With The Residents, it’s hard to know. There’s never been a line indicating where The Residents stop and we begin. The film was made in the same spirit as a lot of what they’ve done. It’s been a very collaborative process. We’ve been showing different iterations of the film to the Cryptic Corporation — and hopefully, they’ve been showing it to The Residents. Even back when I was writing up the first scripts, we were talking through things [with them].

I think that question is probably best answered by The Residents’ fans, as to where this sits among all the other Residents things. Hopefully, it hangs right in there with some of their great film work.

GALO: What’s next for you and for Theory of Obscurity? Do you think the film is limited to SXSW and other festival audiences? Or do you believe nationwide distribution could successfully introduce general audiences to The Residents?

DH: That’s the hope. We’ve had some good response already from distributors. Hopefully, a lot of them will see it at SXSW, so fingers crossed there. Music documentaries have done very well in recent years. Granted, The Residents aren’t your typical music doc.

I hope there’s a home out there for it. Someone who really believes in the deeper things in there: the do-it-yourself idea and doing it because you love it. Those universal themes will hopefully bring someone on board who loves it and sees it in that way. We’ll see.

Other opportunities have come up due to the changing shape of distribution. With something like DOD we could [distribute the film] ourselves. That’s an option, too.

On the film festival front, there’s certainly a lot of stuff coming. We have 10 other festivals lined up already in the US, Canada and Europe, but none of them is public yet. I think it will be a robust film festival run at least. It gives people a chance to see it on the big screen, which is really cool. Then we’ll just go from there. I had a lovely conversation with a guy about theatrical distribution in the UK and Ireland, so that would be great, too. We’re at that moment of “wait and see.”

For me, it’s a really interesting time. I’ve been making films with Dana Nachman — we did three together, and then decided we were each going to make one on our own. She did one called Batkid Begins, which is blowing up huge, and I did The Residents [one], which is doing well. The last one we directed together, called The Human Experiment, is going into theaters on April 17. It’s a very busy time. It’s great for this little production company KTF Films, which is a three person operation, to have several feature-length documentaries out there.

My passion project for the past few years has been documenting Sean Penn’s work in Haiti with his organization J/P HRO. That’s the project I would like to hunker down on and do next. We’ve collected a ton of footage since the earthquake. It would be great to show some of our progress. I was just there in late November. It’s remarkable to see how much has changed in Haiti in the past five years. I would like to carve out the time to make that happen.

GALO: It seems like there’s plenty to do. Though, I suppose, first things first with The Residents at SXSW.

DH: Let’s start there. It’s going to be a great week. We have three screenings, a film panel, and then The Residents are live in concert at the Paramount. I’m exhausted just saying those words, but it’s going to be great. I really hope the audiences there embrace The Residents like I think they will.

The film can hopefully drive people to the concert, which is at the beautiful Paramount Theater there. I think in those very first conversations, we talked about this possibility: “If everything goes right, maybe we could end up in SXSW and we could have a concert.” And now, that’s actually happening. The independent film world is pretty crazy. Nothing ever quite works out the way you think it will, but in this case, it’s pretty darn close.


Video courtesy of Don Hardy.

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