It all started with a bunch of guinea pigs.
Two years ago, filmmaker Bob Ray of Austin, Texas, was working on a documentary film project about an eccentric West Virginia man. After several unsuccessful years of filming, the project fell apart, and Ray began a search for a new subject.
He didn’t have to look far.
Chad Holt, a friend and Austin character, caught Ray’s attention with a story he had written in an underground ’zine.
“He’d written an article about how he was raising guinea pigs for shows — a breeding and grooming show, just like those for dogs and cats,” Ray says with a chuckle. “And that just tickled me because I know what a deviant he is.
“He just writes about all these crazy things, and it’s usually funny, self-deprecating stories that most people would be embarrassed to tell. He has a fan base because of that, but that’s not what got me — it was the guinea pig thing that got me. It just cracked me up.”
So, Ray decided to follow Holt with his camera. The result is “Total Badass,” a documentary Ray has taken on the road along with his documentary “Hell on Wheels,” chronicling the resurrection of the Austin roller derby scene. The national tour brings both films to the Carousel Luxury Cinemas in Greensboro.
Ray decided to forgo the traditional route of shopping his films to festivals, in hopes of scoring recognition and a distribution deal, and market them himself with a grass-roots-style tour.
“I made ('Total Badass’) for $7,000, and that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things,” he says. “And when you go to a festival, if you’re not one of the few films that get picked up, as a low-budget filmmaker, it just keeps adding to the bottom line. I was just trying to figure out a different way of going about it.”
So he took his films, along with Holt, on the road out West for a rowdy tour. Rowdy is sort of expected given that the subject of the film is a drug-dealing deviant known for excessive partying and all sorts of outlandish behavior. That sort of thing makes for exciting cinema, but Ray wanted his film to be more than just an exercise in shock value.
“What I struggled with as a filmmaker was trying to not make it just a litany of these weird things he does,” Ray says. “I was looking for a story arc, and with this kind of documentary, you don’t know what you’re going to get until you get in there. We ended up having a really touching story about how he’s estranged from the mother of his child, so he had to get his act together and do what he has to do to keep his family afloat.”
Contact Jennifer Bringle at jenniferbringle@gmail.com
