"I'm probably more middle of the road than most people I went to film school with," says Dan Orozco, host of Butter City, the hottest talk show to cover filmmaking since Siskel and Ebert ruled the airwaves, "I like movies that I can eat a whole thing of popcorn and drink a whole can of soda to. I think Truffaut called those ‘oral distractions' because he hated movie theaters that sold that stuff."
Forgoing François' sniffing disregard, "oral distraction" applies in an entirely complimentary way to Butter City, a weekly half-hour program that airs 10 pm Sunday nights on three TV frequencies: TPT Channel 17 (13 if you have cable), MTN Channel 16, and SPNN Channel 17. The generally one-on-one broadcast's guest list is made up entirely of people in or from the state of Minnesota who are in some way connected with movie making or movie exhibition. The year-old program is the brainchild of producer Myron Berdahl, a corporate analyst and screenwriter, and aficionado of films ever since he served in the Navy on the USS Nimitz, where the 1980 time-travel adventure The Final Countdown was shot. Myron explains the show's title and theme this way: "When you go to the theater what are you usually armed with? A barrelful of buttered popcorn, right? You're leaving reality behind and going into this new realm, this new city — Butter City!"
I interviewed Myron, along with host Dan, director Heinz Iwen and the rest of the crew at the SPNN studios in downtown St. Paul, where they were getting set to make two back-to-back episodes. Myron, taking a rare breather from his distracting, and slightly militaristic, producing duties, went on to explain, "The title was going to be either Butter City or Twin Cities Art Talk. When you go through the TV guide, and you see Twin Cities Art Talk or Butter City, which would you choose to watch?" This leads to two impetuses behind his creation: to not only give local filmmakers a chance to get more publicity and tell their stories, but to also add some spark to the frequently dry realms of public television and, especially, cable access, whose biggest diversion from erudite forums so far has been the booze-laced Drinking With Ian [3].
Heinz, who has worked for fifteen years as a freelance director and editor — or, as he likes to call himself, "video mercenary" — for SPNN and other outlets, points out that community-based television can have its real-life dramas, especially when it comes to obscenity and bluenoses forever on the lookout for it. "Wednesday evening I work on a Vietnamese news show. To break it up, they get these music videos from Vietnam. I got a long e-mail from a lady who described, in detail, how, in one video, a male dancer's hand brushed across the breast of a female dancer for 3.4 seconds. 3.4 seconds! What, was she timing this?"
However this concerned citizen measured the beastly act, she nearly caused that program to go off the air, thanks to the threat of a $25,000 fine from the FCC. Such could be the fate of Butter City if they are not careful, as they so far have been, about cleaning up foul language and other unsightly elements of sex and violence from clips that guests bring to share. That applied to those from my own films, which were featured on an episode I taped a few weeks prior, and which were pockmarked with more audio excisions than a 50 Cent video. I also inadvertently dated the broadcast by making reference to a couple of future projects.
"I don't mention time or say 'boy, it's hot out today' or talk about next week's or last week's show," explains Dan, who was hired by Myron based on his four years of hosting Cinema Lounge at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, "Each show exists in a vacuum in and of itself so that it can be replayed anytime. The other thing I don't do is mention where we are. Sometimes I'll say ‘local filmmakers' or ‘Midwest' or ‘Minnesota', but I really try to make it universally appealing."
The set for Butter City, though modest by the standards of even two-chair chat shows, should appeal to anyone remotely appreciative of cinema. An old-fashioned 16 mm projector looms like a sentinel over where Dan sits, a monitor for playing clips dominates the center, and a manual typewriter is perched snugly by the guest chair. From this Raymond Chandleresque mechanism's spool dangles a sheet of paper, which bears the first few lines of a script Myron, himself, wrote. This may be the same one that he dispatched to Ellen Burstyn at the Toronto Film Festival and to which he hoped she would lend a "mystical aura."
Ali Selim
Though Burstyn, and her aura, have yet to call him back about his screenplay, Berdahl has managed to hook a number of prominent local film folk onto Butter City. This includes: Ali Selim, director of Sweet Land, who described how he broke into the industry by picking up dog feces on a set he was a production assistant on (adding verisimilitude to the ancient proverb that ends "What, and leave show business?" ); and Patrick Coyle, writer-director of Detective Fiction, who detailed how, when his film was accepted at Sundance in 2003, he had to raise an additional $65,000 in a matter of weeks in order to transfer it from video to celluloid. Easily their best guest — Myron, Heinz, Dan and everyone else agrees — was Melody Gilbert, the state's biggest name in documentary filmmaking, whose effervescence was such that she was invited to fill in for Dan when he was not able to host one show.
Melody Gilbert
There are, of course, those stars who, though they may have Minnesota connections, have, so far, been out of reach of Butter City's net. Among the names mentioned most frequently are: Bill Pohlad, producer of Brokeback Mountain and Into the Wild; the Coen Brothers, who have become so exclusive, they don't even appear on network forums anymore; and some former exotic dancer who won an Oscar for a movie about teen pregnancy. Though Dan would be happy to have these and other luminaries on the program, he admits, "I never think about interviewing them. I would like to go drinking with them, and just sit and bullshit, when they know they're off the record. Once I get them in front of the cameras, though, we're basically going to be hemmed in by their image and we really won't talk about anything new."
In any case, Orozco has had enough brushes with celebrity skin to not be starstruck much anymore, thanks to the ten-plus years he has spent as a First and Second Assistant Director on TV sit coms and major and not-so-major Hollywood releases. A particularly abrasive brush took place during production of the 1999 action flick, The Patriot, which had the misfortune of being completed shortly before the release of Mel Gibson's historical pageant of the same name, and the even greater misfortune of starring Steven Seagal. "It was a negative pickup that had no distribution. It was a terrible movie. Seagal was a prick, a jackass. He was always trying to come off like a calm, pious Bhudda man to all the women. When the women left, he was a cussing, swearing cowboy."
Ira Livingston
The two guests I observed that day, Ira Livingston, regional director of The 48-Hour Film Festival, and James Byrne, who directed a series of short works under the rubric of Flash Fiction Sinema, were Bhuddas of calm during shooting. It was the crew in the control room who were more like cussin' cowboys, dressing down one another, putting down the host and poking fun — playfully — at the guests. In addition to comparing Byrne's profile (playfully) to that of Clint Eastwood they made note of how much the leading lady of one of the works he presented had the appearance and, well, aura of a stripper. All right, the latter notation was made by myself.
James Byrne
It's conceivable, though, that the ladies featured in the clips run on my show reminded the crew of dancers or porn starlets they've enjoyed. For the record, none of the actresses who starred in my films has worked in those branches of the performing arts — so far as I know. However, there was plenty of material to make the bluenoses reach for their stopwatches, as Dan and I discussed, at length, the life and work of Russ Meyer. Meyer, the so-called "King of The Nudies", directly inspired my second feature Vixen Highway [8], and, according to Dan, has stained all my work. That may be true about my third movie, Proinhibition [9], concerning a futuristic rehab center populated by chemically dependent dominatrixes. We also discussed that film's New York premiere, at a festival, Cinekink, dedicated to the strangely uncommercial genre of S&M cinema. But, for some reason, the discussion was cut from the final broadcast. Whether that was due to time constraints, or the titles of the other films on Cinekink's roster that I mentioned, only editor Maria Tototzintle knows for sure.
Oddly enough, the possible subject of a documentary of mine, 6th District Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, is director Heinz's favorite visitor to the SPNN studios. Michele, needless to say, has never been a guest on Butter City. But, as the director recalls: "I do a live show every Thursday evening when the Legislature is in session. Michele Bachmann was a guest quite frequently when she was in the Legislature. There are certain characters that are a show all by themselves. [Michele's] animated, she's controversial, she always has an opinion." As Minnesota's first female member of the House, Michele continues to grace cable access programs — when she has free time between groping the President and saving the world from fluorescent light bulbs.
Strangely, Heinz, as expert as he is at directing traffic on the multi-screen monitor bank, is not a cinema kinda guy. "I think I go to see maybe one movie a year, when my children drag me to these things. I don't watch movies on DVD or on TV. I own a DVD player, but just for making copies of sporting events I cover." This, despite his career as a mercenary of the video arts, and despite the fact that he lived in Germany - the home of cinematic greatness in the 1920's - for the first nine years of his life (those nine years being in the 1950's, not 1920's).
Whether Butter City will be broadcast in Germany, or any other nation or state outside of Minnesota, is a question that probably only audiences, through whatever measurements of viewership SPNN employs, will be able to answer. Though Dan would clearly like to see the show go worldwide, and, just as importantly, desires a wardrobe sponsor, Myron has yet to pursue national or international distribution. Not only is he exhausted by what he had to go through to get the production carried by Twin Cities Public Television, which now airs Butter programs about two months after they premiere on cable access, but, as he says, "Right now I've got enough local talent that's the bread and butter, if you will, of the show to keep it going." Heinz adds to that sentiment by noting that getting national networks to run a show is a "tough nut to crack."
Nuts, popcorn, bread, butter — whatever your poison, it will make a perfect compliment to a half-hour dedicated to oral distractions and the visual ones that accompany them. And, as you watch, remember that this confection is brought to you by a production team made up of volunteers. Perhaps inspired by his unpaid status, Heinz makes sure to ask every one of the guests, as they leave the studio, if they do whatever they talked about for a living. In almost every case, he says, they burst out laughing.