GREENSBORO — It all started with a terrible high school job and a glorious break room discovery.
In 1991, a teenage Nick Prueher swiped the “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties” training video from McDonald’s. The production quality was so poor and the dialogue so forced that Prueher found it to be an inadvertently hilarious piece of comedy.
He showed it to his friend Joe Pickett, and the pair began screening it in their parents’ living rooms while cracking jokes about the fast food chain’s maintenance tips.
“It was so ridiculous,” Prueher said. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I thought the world needed to see this video.”
Twenty years and hundreds of videos later, Prueher and Pickett have taken their love for awkward VHS tapes on the road with the Found Footage Festival.
The show will come to Greensboro Saturday at The Idiot Box, sponsored by The Mixed Tape Film Series and WUAG 103.1 FM.
Prueher and Pickett, whose resumes include “The Onion,” “The Late Show with David Letterman” and the award-winning documentary “Dirty Country,” founded the festival in 2004 in New York. The show offers a tour through the collection of tapes they have accumulated from thrift stores and garage sales, along with plenty of comedic commentary.
“The fun is in the hunt of the video,” Pickett said. “That’s the coolest part about the job.”
Prueher and Pickett have been known to use any means necessary to acquire the best oddities. Pickett once heard Suncoast video store had funny training videos, so he applied for a job, worked a four-hour shift, stole the tapes and quit.
Their extensive collection includes jazzercise tapes, cats meowing to Christmas carols, ventriloquism how-to videos, the informative “How to Seduce Women Through Hypnosis” and “Rent a Friend,” a new find for their latest show in which the man in the video agrees to be your virtual friend for one hour.
Pickett said the most unusual find came when he bought a camcorder at an estate sale that still had a home movie inside it.
“It started off with this old man dressed in a gold vest and a wig dancing to 'Phantom of the Opera,’” Pickett said. “He kind of looked like the guy from 'Silence of the Lambs.’”
The Found Footage Festival has developed a devoted following in its seven-year history and earned praise from The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Whether it’s because of the nostalgia of VHS or the voyeuristic experience of watching training videos and home movies on the big screen, Prueher said the show’s popularity never ceases to amaze them.
“When we first brought the show into a theater, we thought it would just be our friends,” he said. “It seemed like an inside joke. It continues to surprise us that people show up and find this as funny and entertaining as we do.”
A new addition to the Found Footage Festival is a screening before the show of the original copy of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” a popular short documentary from 25 years ago directed by Prueher and Pickett’s friends John Heyn and Jeff Krulik.
“It was this great time capsule,” Prueher said. “These two guys from a public access station in Maryland had the foresight to take a camera and microphone to the parking lot of a Judas Priest concert and record the scene, and what a scene.”
Prueher and Pickett have extended their Found Footage empire beyond the touring show to include a Web series on The Onion’s A.V. Club and a book of their craziest VHS covers due in October.
They plan to scour Triad thrift stores for new footage before the show and encourage anyone with funny found footage to share the wealth.
“We have so much VHS love for the world,” Pickett said. “There’s so much goodness that people haven’t seen.”
Contact Alexa Milan at amilan87@gmail.com
