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Like so many American documentaries, "American Movie" is in large part a document about class. We never see Smith and Price on camera, but even though they are also struggling, no-budget Milwaukee filmmakers, it's clear that there's an unbridgeable gulf between them and Mark Borchardt. Smith and Price are middle-class bohemians with modest cultural capital; both have worked with Michael Moore and on other indie documentaries, and Smith's first film, "American Job," played Sundance in 1996. Except for his three years in the Army, Mark Borchardt has been in Menomonee Falls the whole time, drinking, getting high and making movies called "I Blow Up" and "The More the Scarier III." When he needs privacy to write, Mark drives his 1982 Mercury Zephyr to the Milwaukee County small-plane airport and sits in the car writing on a legal pad.

As for the cast of characters around our budding auteur, I can only fall back on the hackneyed observation that truth is often much, much stranger than fiction. There's no other way to account for Mark's friend Mike Schank, a gentle, bearlike man who can play classical guitar blindfolded and who has a very troubling laugh. Mike recently put an end to his partying days by joining A.A., but during the course of "American Movie" he tries (and apparently fails) to deal with his burgeoning addiction to lottery scratch tickets. Mike's role in Mark's filmmaking career is mainly to stand around with a blank expression on his face and good-naturedly take orders. During the filming of a crucial scene in "Coven," Mark barks at him: "You've seen a lot of movies, right? Do you know how to frame a shot?"

Mark's Swedish-born mother gamely volunteers as an extra and camera-person when needed, and his father is a genial absence (except when he complains about the language in Mark's movies). But Mark's two brothers view his filmmaking career with unconcealed hostility. Their cruelty is partly understandable -- Mark has the randomly expanded vocabulary and motormouth social skills of an autodidact, and was undoubtedly a bossy, demanding, constantly irritating sibling. Mark's real family, besides the inscrutable Mike, includes his remarkably normal and capable girlfriend Joan, along with the misfit troupe of small-town actors he assembles for "Coven" and the abortive "Northwestern." (Mark's greatest failing as a director is probably his inability to tell good acting from bad -- but then, if you ask me, most Hollywood directors have the same problem.) Most important of all is the embittered, toothless Uncle Bill, from whom Mark has somehow wheedled money.

Mark expends more than 30 takes trying to get Bill to say one final line of dialogue that will complete "Coven." Still full of energy and enthusiasm, Mark urges, "You have to believe in what you're saying, Bill." Bill shakes his head morosely. "Well, I don't," he says. "I don't believe in anything that you're doing." For all Mark's doubts and anxieties, he's totally impervious to this kind of abuse when he's working -- this is the moment you realize he's a real artist, even if he's not a great one. He sounds positively gleeful when he describes the setting for "Northwestern," which is also the setting for his own life: "A couple of rusty cars against a rusty background. The earth decays and the cars have decayed and these guys are decaying. That's what it's all about, rust and decay."
salon.com | Nov. 8, 1999

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