Transcript
Ryan McPherson (0:00)
Bumfights. To explain it to somebody now feels so much more tame than it did like in 2010. Why in the world would anybody buy this thing? Bum Fights was its own. Like wake up one day and think, what the fuck did we just do?
Daniel Tanner (0:15)
And for those who think there haven't been consequences, it's like there have 20 years of them going back wouldn't do that again.
Ryan McPherson (0:21)
Some of my favorite artists ever are the ones that are always on some different shit. We have this body of work where you don't know what your entry to indecline was. It could have been through graffiti. It could have been from our theatrical background. You can't really put your finger on like what it is we do because we haven't done the same thing for 20 plus years. Like, we like getting involved in things that we're technically like we have no business being involved in.
Andrew Callahan (0:42)
Brothers, brothers, brothers. Got a question for you guys. Where exactly is the line between exploitation and documentation? It's a question that I've pondered for quite some time as a journalist, yet haven't really reached a definitive answer on is it ethical to film somebody in an extremely vulnerable state if what you've captured delivers an important message about the historical realities of that moment? It seems to be a question that each prominent documentary filmmaker has a different answer to. I've generally followed the motto shoot most things and then make the decision in post production on whether or not to publish it to the world. But the first time I can recall actually withholding footage forever was back in 2018 when a teenager freely confessed to an accidental homicide in Louisiana. And then a year later in 2019, when I stumbled upon an illegal full nude down syndrome strip club in Alabama, wherein the stripper poles were installed in the beds of pickup trucks that were gathered in a circle and the cash tips were going to the parents of the dancers. In an ideal world, I would have called the sheriff, but the sheriff was there drinking a beer. There's also been other situations where I declined to interview somebody for ethical reasons. Most recently two weeks ago, actually about three weeks ago now. But I made contact with an escaped New Orleans jail inmate named Antwan Massey, who's since been captured. He hit me up on Instagram about doing an in person interview about the conditions inside jail that made him want to escape, which I was very excited to conduct before learning that Antwan Massie was convicted of some crimes that aren't so cool. Cool crimes to me is like bank robbery, wire fraud, or petty cocaine possession, not aggravated domestic battery. Still, given the News value of the story. I was still down for a quick interview if I could establish early on that he was in jail for bad reasons. But then Mr. Massee asked me for a $500 cash app deposit, which my lawyer told me would be considered aiding and abetting a fugitive. So I had to pass anyways. Some of my favorite documentary films and movies have been ones that did walk that line. I can remember the Harmony Corinne movie called Gun Mo that I saw in high school, which wasn't a documentary film, but it kind of felt like one. And it featured scenes of a glue huffing animal abusing kids in Ohio doing some crazy stuff. Though it was hard on the eyes, there was a deeper message about the spiritual melancholy in the post industrial rural Midwest around the turn of the millennium. Which, if you can remember if you were alive during Y2K, was an era marked by liberal optimism in the celebration of technological advancement. Despite being called the worst film of the year by the New York Times in 1999, who considered the film to be crass and exploitative, Corinne defended Gunmo, explaining that he was merely acting as a passive voyeur in an existent reality who happened to press record Typical environment that's outside the confines of polite society. However, there have been other celebrated controversial documentary films where the director went beyond the role of a voyeur and actually imposed his will on the primary subject of the film to make a point. One of those was the act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, released in 2012. The film, if you haven't seen it, follows a man named Anwar Kongo, who is the leader of a US backed anti communist death squad that perpetrated the Indonesian mass killings of 1965, which killed up to 100,000 people. In the third act of the film, Oppenheimer helps to organize a theatrical reenactment of these exact massacres, wherein Kongo must play a victim of the massacres in one of the scenes, which caused him to undergo a panic attack and temporarily come to terms with the harm that he'd caused. Though ultimately Congo did snap back into denialism and bravado. Now, in facilitating this transformative theatrical moment, Oppenheimer stepped beyond the role of a passive documentarian to create plot structure. And he was really heralded as a genius for doing that. And I kind of agree. I think it's an amazing film. But today we're not going to be talking about Harmony Koran or Joshua Oppenheimer. We're going to be talking about a film that received really only controversy without much props. Outside these skateboarding graffiti worlds, despite being the Highest sold underground DVD of 2002, selling over 250,000 copies, that film was called Bum Fights, Volume 1, a cause for concern. It was created and distributed by four then high school students from La Mesa, California and Las Vegas who took inspiration from the wild, wild Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s, in the wake of Gummo and Jackass success, when America's countercultural youth was in a sociopathic arms race to make the craziest content possible. Bum Fights, as the name implies, featured videos of bums fighting and mostly revolved around the life and times of Donnie and Rufus, two homeless individuals known to La Mesa, California high school kids as the local stunt bums far before the cameras started rolling. For reference, Donnie and Rufus were hardened local alcoholics who'd become micro celebrities in the area for a proposition they'd often make to teenagers. Give us beer and we'll do any stunt you'd like in return, whether it be running into milk crates, getting inside of shopping carts and running into walls, pulling teeth out and beyond. So a group of kids decided to film them and pay extra beer and extra money for crazier and crazier stunts. Those youths were Ryan McPherson, Daniel Tanner, Zachary Buback and Michael Slyman, who put together Bump fights to show other kids in the area, adding a cause for concern to the end of the title to emphasize the fact that they believed that what they put together was a mirror of street life that reflected the uncomfortable realities and how far some people will go to feed their addict. The problem was Ryan and the guys were the ones paying for it. Needless to say, Bumfights traveled from La Mesa across the entire planet at a rate in which the videographers couldn't imagine, resulting in widespread condemnation for obvious reasons, lawsuits and even the arrest of the directors for illegal prize fighting in far over their heads. Ryan, then not even 20 years old, sold the rights away for all future sequels and stepped away from Bum Fights for good to focus on an independent artistic venture called indecline, which today has evolved into one of the most radical, and you guessed it, controversial art collectives in the country. They've installed life sized butt naked nude statues of Trump across the country, painted giant anti war murals on military training grounds, hijacked dozens upon dozens of billboards, usually with anti consumerist messaging, and even installed the largest piece of illegal graffiti in US history out in the Mojave desert. So essentially, they're still inciting chaos, but in a controlled, direct manner, not involving the homeless. Anyways, these guys have had quite the storied career, from teenage infamy to an adulthood and radical art activism. And what you're about to watch or hear if you're on Spotify or Apple Music, as one of their first candid interviews ever, which we filmed in a warehouse outside Las Vegas. If you're a first time viewer, my name is Andrew Callahan and this is our new long form show called five Cast, which is kind of a podcast type of deal. That's a bit of a departure from our typical punchy style of infield content. For me, this new show has been a bit of a breath of fresh air and I hope you guys like it. Anyways, here it is, an exclusive interview with two of Indicline's founding members who for their own safety, would like to remain anonymous. I was straight. All right, action. We're currently here in Las Vegas. It's about 98 degrees. Is this a typical day in town?