On Saturday I went to our tiny “public cinema” Indy movie house in Mariposa and saw “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” a fascinating documentary about a semi-famous manic-depressive musician/cartoonist.
For some reason the producer of the movie had come to this showing in our small town, and so after the film the 30 of us [the theater seats less than 60] got to spend more than an hour asking more about Johnston as an artist, and the difficulties of film production.
While I thought the subject of a crazy, screeching out-of-tune singer getting some fame [an MTV appearance, etc] must have struck this award-winning movie maker as an interesting film topic, it turns out that no, he is actually a sincere fan of the guy’s music, first and foremost. [And by the end of the film, I was left thinking that hey, there might be something there I could appreciate too…]
Also interesting is that he and the director were going to make a standard interview-based documentary -- and then only when they had started production did they find that Johnston had made psychologically revealing movies from the time he was a teenager, and had recorded an audio cassette of observations ever day of his life, even a tape of getting arrested for vandalizing the Statue of Liberty with Christian fish symbols -- and so there was an overwhelming wealth of material to work with.
Which proved doubly beneficial as weeks and weeks spent with the crazy artist himself resulted in not one minute of useful footage…[only 30 seconds of a magnificently loony dance that plays over the closing credits].
The movie just came out on DVD. A highly recommended study of insanity and creativity.
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